4 Topics Driving Enterprise UX: Results from a Survey
A few weeks back, Uday Gajendar and I asked you to help us redesign the Enterprise UX conference. 330 of you reviewed a list of 19 topics—mostly new tools and technologies that could help designers and researchers scale up their work in enterprise settings — and chose the ones (up to five) that you wanted to learn more about.
Why? More on that below. But first…
What we learned
The four topics you, collectively, found most useful and relevant to your daily work practices were:
- Designing with data (150 votes)
- Systems thinking (149)
- Artificial intelligence/machine learning (143)
- Information architecture/knowledge management (132)
What this means
Take the quickest glance at these four topics and you’ll find it hard to miss the broader themes that inhabit the beating heart of enterprise UX: scale and complexity.
It’s become unimaginable to consider scaling up UX work in the face of an enterprise’s volume of content and demand without designing with data and AI/ML. And we need systems thinking, IA, and knowledge management thinking to help us hold together and make sense of the fragmented, disparate, complex digital landscapes you’ll find typical of any enterprise.
Why we’re asking
Uday and I are rebooting the Enterprise UX conference (virtual, June 6–7). We’ve been helping to curate it ever since it launched back in 2015, through its evolution, name changes (“Enterprise Experience,” “Design at Scale”), and pivot to virtual. Now we’ve returned to a framing that, frankly, we probably shouldn’t have abandoned in the first place. So welcome back, Enterprise UX conference!
What’ll be different in 2023? We’ll focus on the needs of enterprise UX practitioners—the ICs (individual contributors). Frankly, we’d skewed our programming a little too heavily toward enterprise UX managers and leaders in recent few years. ICs—whether researchers, designers, or writers—are the ones increasingly called upon to solve problems of scale and complexity, and we want to make Enterprise UX one of the places that pushes their practices forward.
The topics you helped us identify do just that, and will serve as the frame for the conference; we’ll divide its two days equally among them. We’ll offer sessions that truly demonstrate how each topic can help make you a more effective enterprise UX practitioner. And we’ll temper the potential of drifting toward techno-optimism by making sure the program addresses the very real and, often, destructive consequences of new tools and technologies.
What’s next
Uday and I are going to begin programming Enterprise UX in the coming weeks. We’ll be looking for speakers who have compelling experiences to share with each of the four topics we’ve covered here. As with all Rosenfeld conferences, we hope to surface interesting perspectives from people whose voices don’t regularly appear on speaker rosters — especially those from under or mis-represented communities.
If any of this inspires or excites or, maybe, concerns you—or if you have suggestions for speakers—please post a comment or question below. Oh, yeah, I should probably mention that tickets to Enterprise UX 2023 are now on sale.
Hope to see you there!
