Applying KonMari to Enterprise UX Design
A few years ago, I read Marie Kondo’s book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing,” and it completely changed the way I view organizing and decluttering my home and several aspects of my personal life. KonMari is a brilliant method of simplifying and organizing your home by eliminating items that do not bring joy into your life or have no clear purpose.
That said, when Netflix launched “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” I was very disappointed by how much of the persona that I had visualized in my head through her book contradicted with her onscreen personality. So, at this point, if you haven’t heard of Marie Kondo and want to learn more about her KonMari method, I highly recommend starting with her book and not her Netflix series.
So, what does Marie Kondo have to do with Enterprise UX Design?
I know, it’s a crazy idea. Every time I correlate the KonMari method and UX design, most people give me the looks. So, when I incorporate her philosophies at work, I always try to do so without mentioning ‘Marie Kondo’ or “KonMari.”
I wouldn’t say I am entirely successful at executing all these ideas, but here are my thoughts based on my experience working with Enterprise applications, specifically, legacy monolith applications. You know, these are the ones that are considered to be industry-leading with high adoption rates and consistently appear on the Gartner magic quadrant.
Despite their success, however, these apps are often built using an extremely complex codebase resulting from the countless features that must be added to satisfy customers. As a result, the enterprise UX often comes with layers of complexity, forcing users up a steep learning curve and the need for a great deal of legacy knowledge about the application.
“A booby trap lies within the term “storage.”
Think about it. Have you ever had a product manager or an engineer approach the UX team with questions like, “I’ve got a very small customer request for this small feature. We don’t need the UX team to get involved, but can you tell us where in the UI it needs to go? Like I said, it’s very small, I just need to know where to put it.”
“Putting things away creates the illusion that the clutter problem has been solved. But, sooner or later, all the storage units are full, the room once again overflows with things.”
Yes, as UX designers, we are great organizers and pros at making things look nice and streamlined. But, with each feature neatly organized under a tab or under a dropdown, it’s only a matter of time before those UI patterns are not enough to organize all the features. To paraphrase Marie Kondo, it’s human nature to take the easy route, and most people leap at storage methods that promise quick and convenient ways to remove visible clutter. Obviously, she is talking about home organization, but here lies a great lesson for enterprise UX design as well.
In my experience, nobody intentionally tries to develop and implement poorly designed features or functionality. This is what happens. First, we receive a customer request, it looks like a simple request one of those quick win types. So, we engage our resources right away to respond quickly. Over time, this habit can create havoc across the UI. One simple page is needed, then another, then perhaps a toggle button, one more item to the dropdown, a data grid or a preview panel. If the product is in high demand, the customer requests are constant, and the backlog is never ending. And, product teams never seem to have enough time to pause and to tend to the much needed clean up.
So how do we start?
Kondo says people cannot change their habits without first changing their way of thinking. I could not agree more.
When it comes to UX, I would start with a product team that has goals that are aligned with yours and can really get behind and see the need for this process.
“Tidy a little a day, and you’ll be tidying forever.”
We tend to experience better results when we tidy up in one shot rather than little by little, according to Kondo. I agree, because it worked for my closet. But, I admit, tidying up an enterprise-level application is not nearly as easy to do. However, if the entire product team can commit to the process together rather than executing incrementally, bit-by-bit over a longer period of time, success will be far easier to achieve.
“Before you start, visualize your destination.”
Kondo suggests the key to success is to visualize the ideal lifestyle that we dream about before embarking on any tidying project. She says if we skip this step, we’ll not only delay the whole process, but also put ourselves at a higher risk of reverting to old patterns of behavior. According to Kondo, the goal should always be very concrete in your mind so that you can vividly picture what you want to achieve.
This theory can be applied to any UX redesign effort your team is tasked with. If the team is very clear on the goal and the motivations behind it, everyone will be aligned faster. A design spike is a good process to visualize the high-level goals.
“Start by discarding, all at once, intensely and completely.”
However, before we start to get organized, Kondo says we first must discard things we don’t need. While I had success with this philosophy at a personal level, doing this successfully across an enterprise application that has been around for a while with thousands of active users is, admittedly, much more difficult. If you have precise usage data, deprecating features, a.k.a unwanted clutter, is achievable. However, depending on the number of stakeholders involved, MANY crucial conversations, negotiations, and debates are bound to happen.
“Starting with mementos spells certain failure.”
“The process of deciding what to keep and what to discard will go much more smoothly if you begin with items that are easier to make decisions about.”
Making decisions is probably one of the hardest parts of decluttering and organizing even your own closet. Now, imagine trying to do this with a room full of stakeholders who may be spread across the globe with differing opinions and agendas. Each stakeholder may have emotional attachments to specific features that they helped build. It will take a bit of time and patience to work through these issues and develop your “decluttering” muscle as a team. So, it’s a good practice to start small rather than with a feature with high stakes and visibility. As a team, it will be important to exercise self-control and resist re-organizing the features and functionalities until you have finished identifying what you really want and need to keep.
“Always think in terms of category, not place.”
In many projects, product teams tend to focus on a particular page of a particular section of the application. Don’t start selecting and discarding by location. Instead, Kondo says to tackle one category at a time. Sometimes there are different ways of executing the same functionality in different places across an application. But, how can you rationalize which path is the best? Usage Analytics, customer journey maps, detailed task flows are all very helpful tools that can come in very handy when trying to understand exactly how a feature is used in the real world. It’s also a great idea to reach out to experts in your organization who come in contact with the customers frequently.
“Selection criterion: Does it spark joy?”
I am sure you have seen all those memes about Marie Kondo and her perennial question about whether or not an item “sparks joy.” Even for home decluttering, this question might seem a bit silly. However, it really is a powerful question to ask yourself when you think about it. We must focus on what we want to keep. If we focus on what to eliminate first, it invariably takes more time to get to the same end result. For enterprise UX, perhaps a modification to this question will be helpful: “Is this useful for our users?” “And, does this bring delight to our users?”
Of course, I’ve never met an IT administrator who is actually brimming with joy while using any enterprise application. Perhaps the concept of “delight” seems a bit far-fetched. However, at VMware, keeping this idea as a guiding principle helps keep our team focused on delivering innovative solutions that simply work the way our customers need them to for their businesses.
Testing before shipping
Like any good design methodology, even Marie Kondo recommends validating your concepts. As she says, after all the re-organizing, it might not feel completely right. And, it’s ok to do a bit more touch up until you do feel right. She insists on employing your intuition. When it comes to enterprise UX, this means that we need to test it with our users and retouch it and hone it iteratively. As she says, if we’ve clearly visualized our end goal, then we’ll get to where we want to be faster and more efficiently.
