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...

At my company we've been dreaming of being able to localize our UIs since I started working there. While we have localized here and there for the most part it just doesn't happen. There simply aren't the resources or knowledge. Instead our employees in all branches are required to speak English. I have no idea how branches determine whether a person's ability is up to standard to be hired. I've never seen any guidelines for branch management to follow and admittedly our industry is one where you have to learn a lot of jargon, too. I imagine that may other global enterprises are the same way. This means that your users may struggle to understand your UI, especially those newly hired employees. So part of your user research should be pointed at determining at what level your users can understand written English. Here are guidelines you can use based on the European Framework of Reference for Languages . (See Chapter 9 for more information.) I assigned the readi...