Designing for Enterprise & VR — #IDFBLR
Talk by Niramayee Sarpotdar and Workshop by Kumar Ahir
On May 5th, we had two awesome events at Nutanix’s office as part of the monthly IDF Meetups. Read below for some of the highlights that happened.
Designing for Enterprise — Challenges & Opportunities
Talk by Nirmaayee Sarpotdar, UX Designer at Nutanix
Challenge 1
Scope — tend to be large and span across several business processes across the organisation
How to overcome:
- Start small and stress text ux
- 80/20 focus on what is important to user
- Visualisation based approach
Challenge 2
Complexity — tend to be large and complex linking several business processes across the organisation
How to overcome:
- Understanding the business
- Empathy — live the life of an IT admin (literally)
Challenge 3
Domain experts — niche and varies with each domain. No one size fits all.
How to overcome:
- Ask Me Anything sessions
- Beer with engineers
- Analyse competitors
- Boot camp (bring people from different teams come and talk about what they do)
Challenge 4
Legacy systems — multi-year contracts lead to long product cycles. Software does not get upgraded as often as consumer software; sometimes several years.
How to overcome:
- Solve immediate requirements
- Backward compatibility
- Design for different roles
Challenge 5
Impact of bad design — one mistake has a compounding effect as software is not upgraded that often and can affect business decisions.
How to overcome:
- Keep in mind the shelf life of a mistake
Challenge 6
Task efficiency trumps delight — people prefer same old interface as long as it gets the work done faster. Don’t want to invest time to train people.
How to overcome:
Create awareness about design :
- Design thinking session in bootcamp
- Work with teams that don’t impact the product directly(e.g.: HR, sales)
- Brownbag sessions on design
- Co-creation workshops
Challenge 7
Trade off — Limited user access -difficult to conduct regular process like A/B testing, focus groups, tetc.
How to overcome:
- NuExperience Labs — annual event open to customers. Test new features.
- Customer advisory board (PM and VP talk to customers. Design team piggyback on the calls and observe)
- Surrogates to users — ppl who are next choice to users (speak to customer support , company’s own IT admin)
Challenge 8
Hiring challenges — perception that enterprise products are boring.
How to overcome:
- Internship based hiring
- Building relationship with institute
- Better recruiting process
Suggestions
Infuse consumer-grade design in enterprise software through
Clear design vision — understand user’s goal and help achieve it. Keep design simple.
Reduce complexity — Nutanix software can be upgraded with 1-click while competitors’ software requires poring through manuals and takes days.
Opinionated — present the best optimal way to do a task.
Delightful -Anticipate user needs and design for it. Example: Software upgrade takes hours at a time, so Nutanix team built small games like 2048 that IT Admins can play while the upgrade is in progress/
Design for Virtual Reality(VR)
Workshop by Kumar Ahir, AR/VR Evangelist
Difference between — VR, AR, MR(mixed reality), XR(extended reality)
VR — immersive, transport to new world, simulation
AR — overlay on top of real world
MR — eg: Hololens
Why design for VR
- Nascent and evolving
- Design for real space
- Real immersion
- More adoption
Tech behind VR
- It is difficult for the human eye to focus on nearby objects. VR headsets have a intermediate lens that makes the mobile screen look like it’s far
- Different images projected to each eye. It is superimposed by the brain creating a perception of depth and 3 D
VR concepts
- Field of view (FOV)
- Latency/Video lag
- Degree of freedom (DOF)
VR Fundas
- Depth
- Distance
- Sound
- Ergonomics
- Input controls
- Environment
