Enterprise UX Design

Last week I participated in on UXPin’s Enterprise Summit (2017) . On the last day there was a panel discussion by UX gurus on the state of enterprise UX with Jeff Veen of True Ventures, Lou Rosenfeld, and Marcin Treder of UXPin and Sunita Redd of UXPin. Over and over and over I kept hearing them use the word delight. So here’s what I want to say: Dear Enterprise UX Gurus: STOP! Please stop using the word “delight” in the context of enterprise UX. Just stop. I’m not the only one who wants this . Delight is creating an emotional bond with a user through pleasurable experiences IN ORDER TO SELL THEM SOMETHING. This is wholly a consumer-side idea. Enterprise users have absolutely no choice in whether they get to use our product. It’s already been decided by management. I’m up for a replacement. I personally say I want to give the user a good day, but more importantly I’m trying to make users more efficient. I’m trying to create human capacity for the company. Yeah, it’s still...

I was reading a blog article, " 9 do’s and don’ts of UX design ", this evening and found this particular section concerning: "...sometimes too much corporate oversight can limit the design process, as many clients, who obviously aren’t designers themselves, don’t exactly know what looks and functions best on the web. While they surely have the best intentions, sometimes UX design is best left to the designers—they’re the ones with experience in the field after all." Coming from a corporate environment, this was really more of a whine since it didn't contain any constructive suggestions to handle the situation. So I thought I would share some things I've learned through the years about working with business reps. 1. Everybody is visual. Go with it. While you may have a business analyst to elicit business rules and process and to define the problem, when the solution is a UI it's easier for someone to draw out what they're thinking than to ...

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 ...

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...