Consumer & Enterprise UX
As a designer who has spent some time in working in enterprise solutions and consumer apps, here are some thoughts.
Working with information-dense content
Many legacy enterprise apps are incredibly information dense. The ideal solution might hide all the unnecessary information and reveal only what is needed but the risk of “hiding the wrong thing” could be so devastating that the risk isn’t worth the incremental screen real-estate saved.
This often results in incredibly packed screen designs to decrease white space and increase the cognitive load on the user. The usual justification is that it is up to the users to “learn” how to use the software which is only something that you can get away with in Enterprise software.
Additionally, for many administrative or monitoring solutions, it is important to see information side-by-side for comparison and reference. Complex non-linear workflows make it even more challenging as many options need to be both accessible yet out of the way.
As a result, it is not uncommon for enterprise apps to sacrifice white space to pack more information on the page, because often the user simply needs to see more information to complete more complex tasks.
Perks of Enterprise UX
Best perk for Enterprise UX is the willing test subjects or user candidates. Users are going to be people in your organization or clients that are willing to partake in testing which eliminates most legal issues when conducting usability studies.
Most internal projects are to optimize and improve on existing workflows which your users are usually pretty eager to volunteer for since they are the ones who will be suffering through poorly designed solution. It is in their best interest to get in early of the design process with the feedback.
Although you might have willing subjects, they have full time jobs they need to balance, so it might be hard to obtain their precious time. However, in my experience, if you incentivize for their time, then you might see more volunteers signing up and completing your surveys.
End users are here to stay
If the consumer product is ugly or difficult to use, a consumer can just refuse to use it and even delete the app/software. A business on the other hand could mandate all employees to learn a specific software they user to conduct business even if it has somewhat a steep learning curve.
B2B Enterprise products will be sold to business decision makers who push it down to the users. Things they care about are quantifiable while improving efficiency and security and prevents errors. Most organizations are looking for a solution to replace and optimize existing processes.
Chance to become user-friendly
Not to say enterprise software shouldn’t aim to be user-friendly, but often get away with more complexity on modals and screens as long as certain objectives that are deemed crucial for the business are accomplished. The impact to the bottom line always emerges as the most important factor.
Balancing goals and celebrating wins
Leadership roles in UX at large companies are still fighting for a seat at the table to prove the value of good design. Many UX designers walk a tight rope between satisfying business objectives, technical requirements and user needs. If it can be proven that a better UX will lead to quantifiable increase in productivity that can be measured in major savings, then you have yourself an amazing opportunity and challenge!
If you work in enterprise, there are often stakeholders who have the most sway in the roadmap of a certain product. This sometimes works out quite well because having a fewer points of contact simplifies the requirement gathering and confirming, presenting, and approval process. Unfortunately, it also leaves the possibility of large segments of user’s opinions ignored. Some features being requested that seems unique to a “power” stakeholder can be ignored. This potential conflict of interest is definitely something that the design organization needs to come together to balance the long term vision of a product with immediate “quick wins” so the product can be designed and built in a scalable way.
Legacy systems
Almost all Fortune 500 companies grew to their size partially due to company acquisitions. With each merger, they inherit a completely different system and a matrix of workflows which are patch-worked into existing ones. It’s common to find software dating back to the 80s and 90s still in operation. During that time, the concept to consolidating everything seemed easy. Now, the process of reconciling systems is messy.
Enterprise UX has a tough job of moving current users off of a group of legacy workflows to the new system. This involves deep understanding of users and their goals, multiple systems, mapping complex flows, identifying redundancies, and then dealing with edge cases to see if it can produce the same or better outcome than the current way of doing things. While it’s not always the case, enterprise software tends to be more complex than consumer software even though the mission is to “start fresh” with a new system. The data comes from a pile of old systems that come with its own load of baggage.
The most useful skills for this kind of project is to think about process at a system level, ask the right questions, and effectively document. If you take a look at developers’ diagrams and maps where data comes and goes, it is often very complex and comes with restrictions of what is possible in regards to pulling, storing, and pushing data.
Trust the process
What ends up in front of users might not be completely clean and simple, but you can trust that an enterprise product has passed through the scrutiny of the UX process (double, triple, or quadruple diamond). Our users already have their hands full trying to do their jobs, and we can help lighten the load by clearing away some obstacles.