Enterprise UX Design

There's this thing about the design community, especially visual designers. They generally prefer to use a Mac for design work. I get it. The first time I saw my company's website on a Mac using Netscape, "Wow!"  I've always been a Windows girl, even for design work. I live in the Seattle area. What do you expect? But seriously, there's more to it than that. My first experience with Mac versus Windows was when I was working as an office administrator in a small business with an open office and no conference room environment. My boss, the owner of the business, met multiple times with a designer to create the logo for the company and I always overheard the meeting conversations. My boss kept telling the designer that when he sent over his mocks and she looked at them on her (Windows) computer, the colors were different than when the designer showed her his work (on his Mac). The designer was forced multiple times to look at her computer screen at the color bein...

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...

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...

Recently one of our UX designers floated the idea of going with a font size smaller than our standard because they needed the extra space. Being the avid researcher I am I went out and started hunting for information on best practice font size on the web or in applications. I mean it's been years. Someone must have done a study. I came across someone else on Stackflow asking the same question , but none of the answers were anything supported. Just unsupported tribal knowledge. To make a long story short I managed to find a great study, The Uncrowded Window of Object Recognition , done by Denis G Pellli and Katharine A. Tillman, 2008. It comes down to this. Letters in a word are an object and must be recognizable by the brain. As you reduce a font, you need to add a little space around the letters so they can be recognized. It really doesn't have anything to do with size. Here's an example in the standard Verdana/Helvetica at 13 pixels: "You saved my life,"...

I don’t know what your calendar is like, but at my company at the beginning of the year business and upper level IT managers will prioritize their needs and I’m assigned to different projects depending on priority. Sometimes at this time of the year the air feels electric. It's almost like going on a first date. Will the project be exciting? Will it match my skills? It may sound silly to compare working on a new project to a first date. But, it's far more relevant than you might guess. While we want our users to fall in love with our products, it's wrong for us as technologists to fall in love with them. If we do, we lose the objectivity we need to keep our biases out of our work and we lose the ability to clearly see and measure the results of our work. Psychology of Attraction First, let's learn a little about how falling in love works. There are three stages:  Craving or lust - is used to filter all our options into a group of what we desire in some way.  ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...