Enterprise UX’s role in a complicated tech environment
So, imagine this. You’re a User Experience (UX) designer who’s been asked to join a software development team that’s been working on a project. After the release of their project, they kept receiving negative feedback from their users. Desperately, the team tries to investigate the issues, but can’t seem to understand their users’ feedback. Everything they asked for has been built, so what now? Someone in the team starts questioning the interface, it might need to be a bit fancier. It’s something called ‘UX’ that needs to be ‘added’ to the project. Some minor visual improvements is needed, they think. Should be A-okay. Just a sprint’s worth of work. Right?
Right. So here you are, summoned by the development team. Ready to dive into the project, the stakeholders, the end users, and everything in between. You start off with user research and discover some underlying issues. You’re ready to present these findings, which will surely have an impact on the team’s backlog. But wait… the team is confused. Aren’t you just supposed to come up with new, improved user interfaces? You are also confused: why did they ask you to join the team if not to improve the product? Ah yes, you forgot something. First you need to explain what UX designers actually do.
You “do UX”, but what is it?
User Experience (UX) is the process of designing the overall experience — focusing on usability, accessibility, and satisfaction — that users have when interacting with a (digital) product.
Because what UX designers want to do is understand how people truly behave when trying to fulfil a task. They want to support them whilst improving that behaviour through design.
Okay, that’s “UX”, but what is “Enterprise UX”?
An Enterprise UX designer focuses on improving the digital products (or processes) that people use to do their jobs. This focus means that employees, or users, usually have no choice but to accept the current state of the product and its shortcomings. In addition to that, these products are used frequently, if not daily, by employees. As a result, they know all the ins-and-outs of the product, resulting in added complexity when trying to design a new solution. This approach differs from that of a consumer-focused UX designer, who prioritises user and business needs for digital products that are used voluntarily — allowing people to switch to another application or service if they are dissatisfied with a digital experience. This means that for a consumer focused UX designer a strong commercial mindset is often required to ensure that people continue to use a particular digital product; this isn’t the case in Enterprise UX, where users are not given a choice of what to use.
Recently, I’ve noticed a rise in the popularity of Enterprise UX, or at least I’ve seen more and more UX job-postings online from larger, non-commercial companies. It seems to me that companies are trying to make sure that the products they use internally get some well-deserved UX attention — resulting in better digital products and happier employees.
Enterprise UX x NS
Speaking of large organisations, The Dutch Railways (NS) is an interesting and challenging space for an Enterprise UX designer to be in. UX designers exist in a space where they balance the needs of several (very!) knowledgeable user types and stakeholders. Combine this with a complex technological environment and you’ve got a challenging recipe. But fortunately, it’s one that brings new techniques, and flavours to the UX designer’s skill set.
On the operational side of NS, for example, there are many interconnected digital products supporting thousands of employees. These range from train scheduling and maintenance, to safety and service support, and train drivers scheduling. Most of these digital products are in-house software. None of the out-of-the-box and generic enterprise software, like HR, B2B software. No, no, no. These products are made for a specific type of user, working within a domain that’s so sophisticated that it takes a while (and maybe even a course or two) to even understand what they’re doing.
I’ve mentioned that consumer focused UX differs from Enterprise UX. This difference not only lies in accepting the state of the product, as mentioned earlier, but becomes apparent when looking at some examples of digital products used at NS. The importance of UX for those products doesn’t (only) mean that designers improve the way the product looks, but designers must focus on creating an environment in which making well-informed, yet fast decisions based on lots of data is truly significant. Enterprise UX designers aren’t focused on making the interface perfectly trendy or minimalistic. The focus lies on giving the employee the right information at the right time, so human errors are minimised, and decisions are easily made.
It’s time for some examples
Presenting data in such a way that people can make proper decisions isn’t as easy as it may seem. I’ll give some examples of digital products at NS to get an understanding for this complexity.
Let’s start with the trains themselves. The Netherlands is one of the top 3 busiest rail networks in the world, which makes planning the trains a big puzzle. There are over 250 NS stations, and an average of 1.3 million people travel by train every weekday.
These are just some of the variables that must be considered when planning trains, such as the availability of staff and available seats on the train, ensuring that trains have maximum capacity at peak-hours and less at off-peak hours and that they are available from all the different stations and locations. To do that, as you can imagine, they have to use very sophisticated digital products to make sure that everything from personnel, travellers, train types, infrastructure, energy efficiency and costs are taken into account to create a proper plan that’s beneficial for the business, personnel and the travellers.
Even when you’ve created a detailed plan, in a somewhat-slow-and-human-error-prone digital product, things don’t always go smoothly. In the real world, incidents, bad weather, broken trains are bound to happen. These incidents are monitored in a control centre, where not 1 but 12 types of digital products and real-time data are needed to solve the problems that are happening outside. These users are already looking at 4 screens, making notes on paper and picking up the phone. The last thing they need is more applications, software, or screens, just because the development team felt like they wanted to create a better solution in a different application.
Speaking of the real world. There are about approximately 7000 real people are driving and guarding the trains. They need to use digital products while on the move, and they need tools that support them and not distract them from their duties. So, the information they see needs to be as relevant as possible, so they can act quickly when needed, but also provide the right information to help passengers in all possible scenarios.
What all these above examples have in common, is that an understanding of how the employees do their jobs, should be an important part of any technological innovation (i.e. new software development) to avoid the creation of applications that do not support the actual tasks and problems that employees face. These examples also show us that the context in which the digital product is being used is important and must be considered to fulfil its purpose of supporting people in their jobs. And avoid making it a job to use a particular product.
User experience (UX) is the process of designing the overall experience — focussing on usability, accessibility, and satisfaction — that users have when they interact with a (digital) product.
So, what’s the role of an Enterprise UX designer in IT?
At NS, the UX designer is a part of the process — more specifically, part of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). In version 6 of SAFe, you can see that they’ve placed Lean UX somewhere in the framework, showing that User-Centred Design is important. Without diving too deep into the topic of SAFe and its potential shortcomings for UX, it’s safe to say that the framework is helping conventional organisations slowly uncovering that UX designers aren’t only there for the aesthetics. On the contrary, UX design is about:
1. Designing for expert users
To improve the overall experience that users have when interacting with these unique digital enterprise products, it’s important consider all the functional aspects of the digital product’s design first. Aesthetics will follow once the main purpose of the product and end user is clear. Because what UX designers want to do is understand how people behave and how they want to do their jobs. To support and improve that behaviour through design. Sure, the design will have a certain aesthetic, but that’s not the main purpose of the design. It’s important to note, when designing for expert users, that there will never be a single perfect solution. Everyone finds their own little way of working in the end. And inevitably, new ways of working are uncovered. Therefore, continuous improvement with expert users is crucial when trying to create and maintain a digital product. And you’ve got to make sure that the design choices that are being made, are based on the context of the people and their tasks (i.e. continuously monitor what they are trying to achieve and why).
2. Designing with expert stakeholders
A ‘good’ design isn’t just about the user perspective. It’s also about alignment with the stakeholders. They’re experts in their respective fields, from product management to software development, and have knowledge that’s crucial to understanding processes and all the complexities that go with them. Their support and your understanding of the organisation, its processes, and its people is needed to create a successful design.
3. Designing for efficiency, engagement, and trust
Enterprise UX plays a critical role in making complicated technological products more efficient and focussed on the needs of their users. It’s about doing the right thing once, and not fixing small problems repeatedly. A properly thought-out design doesn’t only affect the time saved by employees using the product (which you could obviously also translate to money being saved). A thought-out design is also created with the involvement of users and stakeholders. This involvement means including them in the design process, listening to them and making sure the teams are solving actual problems. This positively affects engagement and trust in the newly created product. And, also gives the teams working on projects the confidence and enthusiasm to continue improving that what’s being built.
In conclusion, if you want to focus on creating more efficient, user-friendly, and valuable digital products, it might be a good idea for your team to think about involving a UX designer (or maybe consider a career change) in the process. Not just for aesthetic purposes, nor simply as a feature in the process. But as part of the entire project, allowing the designer to research and enter undiscovered terrain of the digital product to further improve the overall experience of your product.
