How UX Creates Business Value in the Enterprise

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 is our ending product, at least that’s how business sees us. It also allows us to talk about where good design comes from and what bad design is.

The end result of the work that an enterprise UX designer does, is the creation of well-thought-out and tested visual and interaction design, or good design, of the enterprise’s internal applications. This work creates value for the company by:

• Increasing productivity

• Good design means employees spend less time completing tasks.
• Good design allows employees to make good decisions for the business.

• Increasing job satisfaction

• Good design improves employee morale and decreases turnover.
• Employees want to be productive. A good day is when they’ve completed their work without any issues.
• Reports of employees happy with a project team's products incentivize them.
• Good design tells a company's employees their time and commitment is valued by the company.

• Increasing ease of learning

• Good design means employees find the company's applications intuitive.
• Good design means employees want to use and adopt the company's applications instead of using workarounds outside of the internal system.
• Good design reduces support calls.

• Reducing training and documentation

• Good design is tailored to our users’ understanding of the industry and their processes and tasks.
• Good design simplifies complex tasks and data.

• Reducing company liability

• Good design reduces the chance of human error which helps to avoid potentially serious events.
• Good design keeps our employees in our system and so does our data.

• Increasing company sales

• Increased productivity means increased capacity. Employees can do more business.
• Good design is shown off to potential customers because employees are proud of their systems.
• Good design makes employees less stressed, so their interactions with customers are better.
• Good design creates more accuracy ultimately leading to more customer loyalty because employees are doing a good job for the customers.

• Reduces application development time and costs

• Informed design reduces rework during and after the project is completed.
• UX research helps to eliminate unnecessary features in projects.