Enterprise UX Design

Did I get your attention? Today in our BA/UX meeting our new, very consumer-oriented UX person asked why he is sent to our business representatives to get answers instead of having access to users. It made me realize how different our process in creating enterprise applications is from the process recommended in UX consumer-driven design Don't get me wrong. Our employees do the work and the applications need to be designed to support them. But the process to complete the work takes center stage. In the enterprise you don't get to allow employees to define the process they would prefer to follow or even maybe currently follow to design a new application or update an old one. There are far more important things that matter to business such as adhering to government compliance and regulations and performing tasks expediently in a predetermined order or process. Many large and international companies have a group that determines the processes that must be followed by employees ...

We've had an on-going discussion at my company about where to place main functional buttons. At one point we were following an application paradigm where all main functional buttons were placed in a menu bar at the top of the page. Prior to that and now we follow a web paradigm where all the buttons are placed at the bottom. We always placed them to the right until one designer started refusing to do this especially with search forms. His reasoning, and rightly so, was that the button was being placed too far to the right and away from the form so that the user was being forced to search for the Search button. When I finally understood my job as an enterprise UX designer, two things changed how I lay buttons out on the page. First, red routes. What is the single main task the user will do on the page? What does that part of their process look? What is the main data and/or inputs they need to do the task? When do they have the data to enter or review so that I arrange that inform...

I was working on Susan Weinshenk's 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People  over the weekend. She has a page about scrolling. What surprised me was that she said people will swipe horizontally and we all know they really don't like scrolling horizontally. This particular issue has been coming up at my work, lately. We have some people who believe that some users are used to working in long tables because either they work in very large Excel spreadsheets or their job role is something to do with accounting. While there may be some users who are used to having to do the scroll left-right, I'm convinced that for most users, we should avoid it at most costs. Even in Excel they've tried to make it easier by adding the ability to hide columns. This entry in Susan's book left me wondering, huh? I know I have no problems swiping horizontally and I don't really think about it any more, but I hate scrolling left-right. So, why? I physically started...

It's the battle cry of all UXers: "You are not the user!" I couldn't possibly count the number of times the UXers at my company have sat around the table complaining about someone who blatantly considered themselves the user and they were to us soooo obviously not the user. Why didn't they see it? One time while I conducted a design workshop with my team. As part of my initial presentation, I had a slide that was that single statement: Remember, you are not the user. I had a manager pipe up, "But John is a user!" John was one of our business representatives. "He's been doing the job for years." I had to back pedal. You can't not recognize someone's experience especially when they're in upper management. This was my first realization that people don't take our battle cry very well, especially in the enterprise world. Many people who work in management have come up from our branches. Even the CEO at my company started ...

I don’t know about you, but I hate design reviews. I finish up a bit of work and then I have to present it to the project team. “Wouldn’t that be better if you moved that down there?” “I don’t like that.”  "It should be just like _______." (Several of us call this JLO or "jello".) And of course we have the occasional business owner who thinks they’re a designer. I have grown a very thick skin. Add on top of it that in Agile, you have very, very little time to get design done. There is no backlog of completed design work. We’re lucky if we have a couple days to get requirements and design before dev is ready to work. So any rework is a major issue. As the sole designer I’m holding up the team or worse the developers will start without me. So getting design right without rework is a major issue. But then once you’re pretty sure about your work, the last thing you want is someone to walk into a design review and blow up your work so that you have to completely sta...

My company is a bottom-up UX company. We don’t have an upper UX manager, so we ourselves have to evangelize UX up to the top. In my group, I was the only UX designer for several years. And then there was two. As the lead I wanted to give our small but growing team some goals. As we talked, we realized that part of the problem we have is that we don’t know how to talk about ourselves to business in a language they understand. We wanted to create an elevator sales pitch for talking to executives. But really we hadn’t really ever listed out what UX can do for the business. I started by researching. We do know what we do from a business perspective, but how often do you sit down and really think about it or name it. I had most of them on my list, but have you ever thought part of your work limits company liability?  (Research is good.) So here is the statement that I came up with about how UX or good design creates business value as a starting place. Why good design? Because that...

As everything in enterprise UX, usability testing provides some interesting challenges. I thought I'd share a few issues and how I've gotten around them. The Process Is Changing, So Make Sure Users Know It First and foremost, in enterprise testing, at least in my experience, we are never testing a UI where the users know the work process, because the basis of the UI is a major change to the process or a new process is being implemented. This is a BIG difference between B2C and enterprise UX! In B2C on an e-commerce website, you can make the assumption that your users know how to shop. This was a big hurdle for me. I never considered that the user didn't know the process. All the testing I had ever done or seen just presented the user with tasks and off they went. It took me a couple years and major testing failures to realize this. One of my developers kept telling me, "They need context! They need context!" And I finally got what context meant. The peo...