Enterprise UX Design

Lately I've been loaned out to another group at my company, but not just to another group. I'm having to work with a third-party consultancy helping with a consumer facing application. They had already been working on the project for over a year when I came on board. Because the consultancy's design group was lead by visual designers and they didn't ask our EUX group about our process and tools, I've been forced into using Sketch and all of its accouterments. Sketch is THE most miserable software I have ever used for enterprise UI design, followed by Abstract the version control I was forced into. I happen to be heavy-fingered on the mouse. Because of it, layers unknowingly move around on me constantly. Even when I'm aware, it can happen and I'm trying hard not let it happen. I screwed things up in a master library file royally. But I wasn't alone. 3 of the other 4 designers have done the same. Sketch is probably quite fine for small consumer produc...

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...