Why We Never Seem to Have Enough UX Designers in Enterprise Software

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

At home, I am married to a “creative”, and living with her through the years has taught me just how differently we are wired. I couldn’t do what she does. And she couldn’t do what I do. We have our share of conflicts and frustrations, but by and large I would say our relationship has been filled with awe and admiration for each other’s talents, and in our 30+ years together we even learned to “synergize” our superpowers when tackling all sorts of challenges life throws at us.

With that as a backdrop, it is no wonder as a product manager I loved working with UX researchers and UX designers. They were my “creative” partners at work.

So to all the UX colleagues I worked with over my product management career, if I didn’t have a chance to tell you before my retirement what a joy and privilege it was to work shoulder-to-shoulder with you, let it be known how much I appreciated the craft you brought to the table, and the art we were able to make together. Thank you!

As a token of my thanks, I would like to dedicate this story to my UX colleagues.

In this story, I will explore an interesting phenomenon afflicting product organizations across our enterprise software industry, a phenomenon I call “The UX Paradox”.

The UX Paradox

“The UX paradox” is best represented by the following sentiment:

“We have been growing our UX teams like crazy the last few years, so why does it still feel like we never have enough people to do the work?”

I can certainly relate to this sentiment. When I started a major UX-intensive project in 2017, our product team only had one UX designer. As brilliant as he was, the scope of work clearly required more than one UX designer, so he was constantly stressed out and overworked. Fortunately, realizing just-in-time the mission critical role UX plays in our modern generation of products, my employer started hiring UX professionals like there was no tomorrow.

First, my employer acquired a software design firm to jumpstart our bench strength and core competence. Then, we brought on UX executives from the outside, and we continued to hire organically at a rapid rate.

Now, the same product team I was on (one of many product teams within the company) has its own small army of UX researchers and UX designers, yet they are all still stressed out and overworked. Yes, the product footprint has grown steadily over the years, but it still cannot fully explain why the demands on our UX teams has outpaced every other team, including PMs and Devs. What is happening here?

This question has been puzzling me the last couple years, but I never bothered to take a step back from the rat race to find the answer. Now that I am retired, I finally have a chance to contemplate the question to see what I can come up with.

UX Trends in Enterprise Software

When in doubt, brainstorm on a Miro board!

I started by brainstorming the biggest trends in enterprise software design in recent years that may have contributed to our overflowing UX workload.

In less than 15 minutes, I had more than 40 stickies on the board. Well-trained by my UX colleagues, I immediately proceeded to group them to see if any patterns would emerge. Lo and behold, they fell neatly into six major trends.

I included a screenshot of my Miro board here for grins. You don’t have to read the fine print. It’s just to give you an idea of the approach I took.

Trends Impacting UX Design Effort

The six major trends driving up UX research and UX design efforts are:

• Target Users — we are designing for an ever expanding number of user personas
• Vertical Industries — we have evolved from designing one generic horizontal solution to designing purpose-built solutions for specific vertical industries (from a handful to dozens of them)
• UI Choice — users are interacting with our software through an ever expanding choice of devices and UIs
• UI Sophistication — UI’s have grown from simple lists and forms into feature rich, highly contextual, and intelligent interfaces
• Modern Work Styles — single-purpose UIs have evolved into personalized and collaborative spaces to reflect how workers prefer to do their work
• UI Frameworks — end user application UIs have evolved into powerful frameworks that allow customizations, integrations, and automations.

Each one of these six major trends could translate into a significant amount of extra UX design work, but here is the zinger — taken together, their impacts are not additive, but multiplicative!

For example, if we wanted to support another industry solution, we would have to consider:

• the industry variants of existing personas (e.g. agent, manager, admin, etc.), as well as all the new industry-specific personas for that industry
• all the UI choices for those personas (e.g. the telco industry involves field service technicians who rely heavily on mobile applications)
• the right level of sophistication required for each UI
• the modern work styles applicable to that industry, and
• the implications on the UI framework.

Let’s pause here and reflect. Is it any wonder we are unable to “catch up” no matter how quickly we are expanding our UX teams?

The “6D Model” of UX Design Effort

So far all this makes intuitive sense to me, but I still wanted to see if there was a way to visualize the compounding effects these six major trends had on our total UX design effort. (Note: in this story, when I say “UX design effort” it is safe to assume I am talking about both the UX research effort and the UX design effort.)

If we consider each major trend to be a physical “dimension” of the overall UX design effort — let’s call this our “6D Model” — then the UX workload could be represented by the “volume” of the 6D object.

Since it’s difficult to represent a 6D object on our low tech 2D smartphone screens (maybe even impossible? any mathematicians in the audience?) I had to look for a simpler way to visualize this 6D model spatially in 2D.

After some experimentation, Voila! I found that using a radar graph (a.k.a. spider graph), we can easily visualize how scope increases along each of the six dimensions would cause our overall UX design workload to expand. I mocked up a radar graph to illustrate this.

This is just a visual aid. The units of complexity along each dimension and the relative values for 2000 and 2022 values were assigned whimsically by yours truly, but hopefully this radar graph helps us to visualize conceptually why the demand on our UX teams has gone up so dramatically.

Although it is very difficult to analyze this phenomenon more quantitatively, it is relatively easy to describe each of the dimensions in more detail qualitatively, and it may be just as enlightening. In this section we will examine each dimension in turn to get a better sense of the type and amount of UX design effort involved.

NOTE: if you feel you have a solid grasp of the six dimensions based on the short bullets above and prefer a shorter read, please feel free to skip to the next section, “Problem or Opportunity?”.

Target Users

At the start of my career, it was not uncommon for an enterprise software application UI to be designed for one or two mainstream user personas. As the industry matured, it is not uncommon nowadays to see software that offers optimized UIs for many more user personas, such as:

• Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 vs. Tier 3 users along a workflow escalation hierarchy
• Supervisors and Managers
• Administrators
• Business users performing lightweight software administration on their SaaS applications
• Business Analysts
• Users who are part of a “gig economy” (E.g. Uber/Lyft) who must interact with the system on a transaction-by-transaction basis, through a very simple and intuitive UI that requires little or no training
• Users along a value chain such as franchisees, resellers, contractors, etc. requiring different levels of access to features and data
• Users with special needs such as the visually or physically impaired
• End customers, when the business wants to offer self-service capabilities and more transparency
• Different demographics, such as younger generations who are more tech savvy or expect more mobile capabilities

These are just some common examples, and it is already a pretty long list. Considering that each target persona requires a set of user research and UX design activities, the UX effort can mushroom very quickly.

Vertical Industries

When I started out in my career, enterprise software vendors mostly either:

• produced software for a specific industry (e.g. for healthcare, accounting, etc.), or
• produced horizontal software that could serve many industries (e.g. ERP, CRM, etc.) and relied on software VARs (value added resellers), ISVs (independent software vendors who built add-ons), and SIs (systems integrators) to create vertical industry solutions.

Since then, for many very legitimate reasons, the horizontal software vendors have decided to build vertical industry solutions that would:

• encapsulate industry best practices in the software
• dramatically reduce implementation complexity and cost
• dramatically shorten time-to-value for customers, and
• along with the rise of SaaS (software-as-a-service) allows the SaaS software vendor to market and sell directly to the business users

From a UX perspective, each vertical industry brings new flavors of existing user personas (e.g. agents, managers, etc.), as well as brand new personas unique to the industry. Therefore, each vertical industry requires its own set of in-depth user research and UX design activities.

UI Choice

As if a long list of user personas across a number of vertical industries was not daunting enough, businesses are now expected to provide multiple ways for users to interact with their software. Having spent most of my career in the customer service CRM (Customer Relationship Management) arena, it has been mind-boggling to witness all the new ways businesses nowadays have to “meet their customers where they are”, and this trend seems to be accelerating with the advent of ever more devices, communication platforms, and intelligent bots.

As an example, consider how we interact with our bank. It is now commonplace to be able to interact with your bank via:

• a website
• secure messaging
• a mobile app
• an IVR (interactive voice response), which may support touch tone, speech, and natural language interactions
• a chat bot, available on the website, or directly via an SMS short-code, or via a popular messaging platform depending on geography, like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Apple Business Chat, Google Business Messenger, etc.

Each UI is a customer touchpoint that can impact their overall customer experience with the brand, so each UI needs to be carefully crafted. Moreover, customers may be arbitrarily “channel hopping” from one interface to another, from one interaction to the next, so businesses have to further orchestrate all of the above channels into a seamless “omni-channel” UX.

If this sounds difficult, it is. The problem is further compounded by the fact that these are often multi-vendor solutions, where the “last mile integration” is done by a systems integrator who has limited UX design capabilities.

So next time you call your bank and are irritated by the number of times you are asked to authenticate yourself across different interfaces, only to be challenged yet one more time when you reach a live agent, this is what is happening behind the scenes.

This is pointing to a dire need for UX design professionals to be engaged not just in product development, but in the field during implementation phase as well. Unfortunately, most systems integrators are staffed with “architects” and “implementation specialists”, but have yet to build up their professional “UX designer” bench strength.

Now let’s shift gears and look at the internal users — the employees of the business. There was a time when businesses could dictate to their employees how they will interact with their enterprise software. As an employee, it was not uncommon to be coldly told, “If you are having PC issues, thou shalt open a trouble ticket. There is no IT help desk phone number to call, no IT guy or gal to email. Open the trouble ticket, and we will contact you.”

But in today’s competitive labor market for skilled talent, even that has changed. More than ever, businesses are trying to create great employee experiences. You can choose to use a PC or a Mac. You can use iOS or Android. You can use the employee portal or a mobile app. And you can use a chat bot just like our customers can. The good news is, some of these IT investments are win-win propositions that also benefit the business because they allow employees to self-serve, and that reduces support costs. However, from a UX design perspective, it is yet another set of UX design activities that must be undertaken.

UI Sophistication

Regardless of the target user persona and the UI of choice, the sophistication of UIs today is advancing by leaps and bounds. Once again using customer support CRM applications as a reference point, one can see how much things have evolved since the days of simple lists and forms. The most advanced CRM applications today provide a customer support agent UX that supports the following:

• a beautiful and informative “landing page” to start your day
• multi-tab UI for multi-tasking
• a skills-based work routing engine that optimizes your work assignments across all support channels
• robust media channel management capabilities (e.g. email, chat, mobile messaging, phone, web/video collaboration, social channels, etc.)
• convenient mashup of customer information from all data sources
• powerful search capabilities
• dynamic screen layouts based on the case type, data values on the page, or the stage of the case
• helpful tools such as AI/ML recommended knowledge articles, related cases, next best actions, expert finders; and collaboration tools
• inline analytics
• the ability to personalize the UI you stare at 8+ hours each day
• notifications and alerts

The list goes on and on, and every capability requires UX design effort.

Modern Work Styles

This dimension is evolving more quickly than ever before as enterprise users themselves are adopting a wider range of work styles. Using customer service CRM agents as an example, the Covid pandemic alone has accelerated the adoption of remote working and highlighted its challenges:

• No longer having the ability to peek over their cubicle wall and ask for help, agents need ways to get help when they get stuck.
• No longer able to “manage by walking around”, supervisors and managers need tools to monitor the performance of their agents remotely.
• No longer able to build up team morale in person, businesses need “employee engagement” tools and gamification strategies to keep the team motivated and connected.
• As users juggle work with home responsibilities, they need more flexibility in their work schedules and workflows.

Even though many businesses had to send all their workers home overnight, many of the software enhancements they need to function optimally are still sitting in product backlogs. It’s a lot for product teams to work through, and addressing these work style changes properly requires a lot of UX design work.

UI Frameworks

With all of the above demands on software UIs, plus the unique needs of every business, it is impossible for software vendors to meet every need of every target user persona with our out-of-the-box software UI’s. The answer is to offer UI frameworks that allow customers to tailor the UIs to meet their specific needs.

UI frameworks typically provide the following capabilities:

• a “design system” comprising of a rich library of reusable UI components that gives resulting applications a consistent look-and-feel
• a graphical design tool that allows a developer, administrator, or citizen developer to modify out-of-the-box UI pages with customizations, integrations, automations, etc. or create brand new UI pages from scratch.
• a runtime engine that executes the UI pages.

While UI frameworks are a huge value to the software vendor and to customers and their supporting ecosystem, they require a huge UX design investment. Here are just some of the major UX efforts required:

• designing the design system, which requires understanding the superset of needs from all consuming applications, and designing common components that can be mixed-and-matched to meet those needs
• migrating existing applications to the new UI framework
• creating new applications on the new UI framework
• designing the UX for the graphical design tool and related software deployment tools. This is especially challenging when the tool needs to provide maximum flexibility to hardcore developers, while making simple UX design changes simple for administrators and citizen developers.

In addition to these mainstream UX efforts, the added power and flexibility afforded by a UI framework has given rise to a new set of demands on the UX team. I cannot count the number of times my UX resources were pulled from my projects to work on one of the following “emergencies” (and sometimes I was pulled in as a PM as well):

• Pre-sales engagements — working with the sales team and their strategic prospect/customer to help win a big deal by creating a compelling “art-of-the-possible” product demo based on deep customer insights.
• Post-sales Customer Escalations — working with an implementation partner to help prevent losing an important customer due to UX issues.
• “Vision Mock-ups” of futuristic looking UIs for trade-shows and marketing events

Directly and indirectly, building a UI Framework requires a huge UX effort across the entire product organization.

Problem or Opportunity?

Now that I have outlined some of the trends simultaneously driving significant UX investments, I hope they help to explain why we seem to never have enough UX designers.

Should we worry that these trends seem to be accelerating along all six dimensions, with no signs of abating?

I think the answer lies in whether we believe this is a huge problem or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Having invested a great deal of my 30-year career focused on building great UX’s, I have seen firsthand how stressful it can be to feel like you can never get ahead of the curve.

However, being the eternal optimist that I am, I see nothing but opportunity here. All the trends outlined above signify progress, progress I am not only eager to see, but worked hard to cultivate and advance throughout my career.

These trends are the natural next steps of evolution for an industry that has prided itself in adopting design thinking and making software more intelligent, more efficient, more delightful, and more accessible to everyone.

And if the cohort of UX professionals I had the pleasure of working with is any reflection of the talent that is out there in the industry, I would say we are well-equipped to take on this challenge and capture this opportunity.

I know what you’re thinking, “It’s easy for you to say — you’re retired!”

Yes, you are right. But I intend to be there with you in spirit every step of the way.

My Recommendations

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein

This quote truly applies here. The explosion of demand for UX design is a direct result of our desire in the enterprise software industry to build ever better software, but our organic growth and brute force methods will only take us so far. To get a handle on the tsunami of UX work heading our way, we will need to think differently.

Here are my recommendations:

• Rethink the role and status of the UX team in your product organization. Given how mission critical it is to deliver a great UX, are we treating our UX team as first class citizens, or are they still second-fiddle to our PMs and engineers? This is a bit of a catch-22. Some people may argue that their strongest performers today are in PM and engineering, and therefore UX should follow their lead. But if we truly believe UX design is mission critical to our success, we need to create the space for our UX teams to grow into. If the leadership or individual talent is not quite where they need to be, we need to hire them or develop them. This is critically important because our organizational power structure will determine how our products are built — whether they are truly “design-led” or “designed-as-ordered”.
• Abandon any preconceived notion of what an ideal “rule-of-thumb” UX-to-PM or UX-to-engineer ratio should be for your product organization (e.g. 1:5, 1:10, etc.) Start looking with fresh eyes at the amount of work facing your UX team. There is no easy one-size-fits-all rule-of-thumb. I hope the 6D Model I shared above helps you to systematically review all the work on your UX plate, so you can prioritize and staff up accordingly.
• Rethink the Value Chain. With the 6D Model in place, we can revisit the role of UX design in product, pre-sales, and post-sales implementation. While this may not reduce the overall need for UX talent within the company, it could help to “operationalize” the work and reduce the number of “emergency engagements” from the product team that could derail development projects. Rethinking the value chain may also involve thinking strategically about partnerships and where the software vendor’s job ends and where VARs, ISVs, and SIs could step in to build vertical solutions, reducing the need for software vendors to build up deeply specialized UX knowledge across an ever expanding number of vertical industries.
• Prioritize through a UX lens. Product orgs are no stranger to prioritization. PMs manage huge backlogs all the time and are accustomed to ruthless prioritization. However, the dependencies on their UX team are not always evaluated critically and taken into consideration. Nor are product UX requirements (e.g. fixing known UX issues) always given the priority they deserve. With UX elevated to first-class citizen status working shoulder-to-shoulder with PM and Engineering, the UX work priority and UX workload would get the visibility and attention they deserve.
• Grow the talent pool. If I accomplished nothing else in this story, I hope I was able to convince you of the immense size of the opportunity in front of us. I think we can all agree that the talent pool out there is far short of the need. As an industry, we need to get creative in how we attract talent and develop them. Fortunately, for the “creatives” out there, this is a great opportunity to get into a very rewarding profession.

With these recommendations, I hope we can turn our UX paradox into the exciting opportunity it represents.

Closing Comments

When I set out to write this story, I was motivated by my sense of appreciation and gratitude toward my UX colleagues and wanted to shine a spotlight on the many ways they bring value to our products.

I did not set out to create a 6D Model of the underlying trends driving all the demand for the great work of our UX colleagues, but now that the 6D Model invented itself through the course of this writing, I hope it is useful to my PM and UX colleagues alike, by helping them think more critically about their UX investments.

It has been a pleasant surprise to uncover deeper insights on a topic I am passionate about through the process of writing about it. This blogging thing is even more fun than I thought.

Anyway, I will end with my all time favorite quote about UX design:

“It’s easy to make it hard, and hard to make it easy.”

Let’s make it easy!