As a designer we studied a lot about “keep it simple”, “less is more” and “don’t make me think” concept, those are a great concept when creating an app, but how do we use those principles when creating an Enterprise Apps, or Apps for Industries, those principles can sometimes be detrimental to good user experience. Simplicity can clash with the fundamental complexity of enterprise apps and processes.
In short Enterprise, Apps are Internal Apps used by Enterprises / Industrial to fulfill their needs. A complex app used by their employee, mostly containing a chart, table, form, etc.
Keep in mind that we often find it difficult to implement those most popular principles above when it clashes with what our user needs.
Enterprise apps are often too complex with many features and a lot of data or we call it “feature creep”, we can’t fully avoid it because it can affect their business process involving a lot of our customer money.
We might be tempted to implement our ideal solution on the platform, then we wonder is it the best way to present it.
With that in mind, how do we make sure designing these complex features apps help them achieve their goal? While enterprise applications are generally much more complex than consumer applications, a UX designer should minimize the impact of that complexity on users, here’s some way to achieve that.
Thank you
Creating a Role-Based UI
To make the system as simple as possible, though never as simple as we mean to be, creating a role-based UI can be helpful to revealing feature functionality only when a user needs it. So particular users see only the functionality they need. Often, achieving simplification means battling features to eliminate functionality that users don’t need or better, to avoid adding it in the first place.
Understanding The Users
Unlike the usual customer-facing apps, when we’re working on an enterprise application, we’re designing for people who are likely to use it day in, day out. They learn the parts of it that are most relevant to their particular work.
“ One of the biggest differences between enterprise and consumer applications is that most users of enterprise applications don’t have a choice about using them, their employee telling them to do so “
Extra empathizing with our users and understanding their pain points can help us make a better decision for the app’s design. Qualitative research can be an effective way to collect data from our users. We can create an interview session or Forum Group Discussion. Having an actual insight from our specific user can help us make accurate decision making.
Complex but not Complicated
Simplification doesn’t always work in an enterprise environment. As an outsider or not expertise, we can’t oversimplify the data or information that our user needs. It can create misleading information and prevents professionals from doing their job successfully.
Enterprise applications tend to offer more features to provide business intelligence, workflows, collaboration, and productivity-management capabilities. So enterprise applications still tend to be more complex than consumer applications. This often leads UX designers to use more hide-and-peek design patterns. The intent of these patterns such as tabs, accordions, and carousels is to make large data sets or amounts of content more digestible.
Understand the Business Model and Goals
The first thing to remember is that we’re designing for busy professionals who need to complete their tasks. The business goal is not the same with ease of use. Tried to understand our user’s goals, no matter how hard or unfamiliar you are in their industries or expertise.
Always check all documents related to your project, be it business documents or data documents. It can help you when designing your platform whether those documents need to be shown in actual number or percentage number. For example, some companies show their goal achievement with percentage number and the other use a comparison between goals achieved and remaining goals.
Use the Right Chart
The main function of a chart is to display data. When making your chart, think about the specific information that you want your data to support or the outcome that you want to achieve.
Keep your chart simple, bombarding an audience with data will likely leave them confused and uncertain. A basic bar chart or pie chart can be the best practice to show the visualization of data.
Conclusion
- Creating a Role-Based UI can be helpful to reduce distraction and mitigate mistakes in users’ daily activity.
- Extra empathizing to the user is needed, they’re going to use the system 7–5 or even more every day they working.
- Understanding the Business Model and Goals can help make a correct decision.
- Don’t oversimplify, it prevents professionals / user from doing their job properly.
- Make users navigate to what they need quickly.
