Enterprise UX Design

For the 12+ years that I have worked at my company I have had extremely limited access to users. I’ve only made 3 branch visits over that time and what little access I have had, has been reserved for usability testing the applications I was working on. And, when branch visits are set up UX is usually the last person considered as a candidate to go. But when you are starting a project you need to know who you are designing for. What do you do? Covert user research! Believe it or not there are a lot of ways for you to find out about people without talking to them directly. Find User Representatives User representatives are people who are not the user, but may have been the user at some point in their career. Sometimes your business representatives can be user representatives if they did the job. I would give a word of caution here. While your business representative may have worked “in operations”, they are also heavily invested in the business goals of the company. So, you rea...

Interviews are supposed to be conversations. As the interviewee, you’re supposed to be able to decide whether you want the job equally as much as the company decides whether to hire you. The problem is, in my experience on the interviewer side of the table, people don’t really ask good questions about what they’re coming into. You should know enough about your own discipline to ask good questions about the work you would be doing and the environment in which you would be working. This way you can decide on your end, if you would be happy at a new company. The following questions are grouped based on areas of issues within the enterprise environment. Many of them could be used for interviewing in a customer UX situation, too. The State of UX at the Company Knowing where the company is at in their journey towards user-centered design will tell you how well you will be supported in your job role and whether or how much you will have to fight to do the entire spectrum your job, i...