Enterprise UX is amazing. Change my mind.
Why this under-represented but widespread design field comes with lots of unique and interesting challenges.
As promised, here is a follow-up piece to my previous post — Part 1: The differences between enterprise and consumer UX. This follow-up is a bit less objective and instead, deeply rooted in my personal experiences and why I personally enjoy working in Enterprise UX.
You get to break things down… So you can build it back up
Breaking down a large messy workflow into smaller chunks can be quite difficult. There is nothing quite like the decades of baggage that many enterprise organizations bring to the table. Even understanding some problems requires dipping your toe into many subject matters to map things out.
Only once you understand how everything connects can you start identifying and organizing work into manageable pieces.
You continuously learn more about the reasons behind every goal and limitation you encounter (which are many). This broadens your understanding of many areas that are closely interconnected to your specific project as well as how other members of your organization work. You get to build proficiency in connecting the dots and looking at projects from a systems-level perspective.
It is tough to always be learning, but you will often not be alone. A team of subject matter experts will likely be there to help you understand, and it can be incredibly rewarding when things seem to click and you enjoy a brief “aha” moment.
- Sometimes it comes from an off-hand comment a user makes when they demonstrate their day-to-day work processes.
- Sometimes it comes from developers explaining to you how various databases are redundantly storing data and introducing inconsistencies.
- Sometimes it comes from talking to many PMs and noting that they all want the same thing but are just expressing their needs differently.
As you learn and start seeing the bigger picture, you see a giant web of interconnected regulations, technical constraints, business objectives, timeline pressures, user needs, user wants... And more! While this is the case for most UX projects, the enterprise space is somewhat unique in the dizzying layers of complexity because you are likely designing for a very specific set of users who have high technical knowledge and opinions about how they would like a solution to work.
Complex solutions for complex problems
Complexity is often born out of standardization and regulation of things that are not easily lumped together. Workflows that start out simple can easily get chopped up and mushed into stiff boxes for the sake of consistency, accuracy, and accountability.
It’s likely that the solutions you try will not be a simple “rule of thumb” interaction based on some best practices from mature design systems (hello Material). The fun will come from communicating with all your stakeholders and users, mixing things together, taking cues from other products and cherry-picking elements that could fit your unique user flow.
You will often feel like Leonardo da Vinci when after multiple failures.. you “discover” something that shows promise to the users. Something that you have never seen in a Medium post before because your use cases and constraints might be just that unique. You might feel like a creative genius having successfully balanced so many different variables and limitations to come to a feasible solution.
Documentation for days
I am a huge documentation nerd. Many I have worked with will testify that my happy place is a well-structured Confluence page that is properly linked out and cross-referenced. I realize my quest for order may be seen as a bit overkill when projects are not as complex, and therefore I am happy to find a need for it in many Enterprise UX projects.
Like most UX projects, enterprise design comes with tons of stakeholders and it is crucial to keep everyone on the same page. You also don’t want to constantly be having meetings just to keep people up to date. This is where documentation pulls its weight.
I derive a great sense of pleasure from being able to see the progression of a design through many iterations. For each iteration, I generally like to write down:
- Our understanding of the goals for this round
- What we hypothesized would help achieve them
- What ended up working
- What changes does this new knowledge inform?
The value of documentation is directly correlated with how big a project grows. The more people you work with, the longer the project, the more features you cover, the more complex flows are and the more iterations you do… these factors and more all tend to swell, especially in enterprise UX. It becomes more important than ever to have a good log of when and why decisions are being made, as well as whose inputs drove that decision.
I have found that stakeholders, users and team members love to see their feedback tracked and addressed (with rationale on why it was or was not incorporated). It helps them to understand the design team’s efforts and progress and drives home the value of the UX process.
Using the popular quote “history tends to repeat itself”, design teams tend to gain much more confidence in future decisions when they feel they have a decent understanding of past decisions and the compromises that they each came with.
Goals that I vibe with
A large goal that spans across many enterprise software is to optimize digital workflows. For example, the three key things my current company offers are solutions for managing, modernizing and securing an organization’s IT infrastructure.
This is a goal I can really get behind as many of our solutions are designed to help alleviate very manual, boring and error-prone tasks.
Some examples of solutions I have personally worked on include:
- Optimizing VM loads for large virtualized environments
- Managing security and updates for mobile devices
- Automating calculations for modelling investment portfolios
- Migrating windows services such as Azure AD.
Sure these sound about as boring as “solutions” get.
But let’s look at my current project... in the event of an organization service switch or acquisition, it is usually a lot of hard work migrating thousands of users from one IT service to another. If anything goes wrong, it could result in security breaches, loss of data, and downtime that can result in massive productivity and business losses.
Every extra minute wasted on a poorly functioning workflow that increases avoidable errors adds up to more stress for our users. Just think of the overtime and headache that admins would suffer if important data was lost or migrated incorrectly.
Being able to iterate on solutions that instill peace of mind for IT admins and their users to efficiently and successfully migrate an IT service can free up their bandwidth to address other responsibilities. Heck, it might even allow them the time to drive their kids to soccer!
This is something I feel very proud of, that my hard work in iterating through many different ideas, combined with the feedback and insight with my team and our users can result in a more usable product that saves our users time and helps them to do their job successfully.
Less murky ethics
One of the big issues that designers around the world are coming to terms with is design ethics. The emergence of better tracking and analytical tools kicked off the uncomfortable rise of dark patterns.
A great example of this was in travel booking sites, where the data showed that invoking a sense of urgency by displaying “X other people are also looking at this deal” would push a user to be more reckless with their purchasing decision.
Other tactics weaponize your preference and usage data, then feed you designs that are psychologically designed to prey on your emotions to incentivize certain behaviours.
For the most part, Enterprise software wants the user to interact with it as little as possible. The results speak for themselves in the sense that users shouldn’t be using it unless they need to address an issue or accomplish a task. There is no extra incentive to keep users “engaged” as we want them in and out, hopefully with a feeling of satisfaction for having accomplished what they entered the app to do.
When we do use psychology, it is usually to accomplish a functional purpose of either garnering attention (for an error that they need to address) or to hint at the next steps in a particular workflow. For the most part our goals as enterprise designers align with the user’s desire to get stuff done in a secure, efficient, and accurate manner. Nice.
Opportunities
Lastly, I mentioned this in my other article, but there are so many OPPORTUNITIES in Enterprise UX. Not only are your users counting on you to help them do their jobs, but the industry as a whole is counting on you.
Enterprise UX is still seen as the underdog. You know there is long road ahead when for many projects, the goal is to have “consumer-grade” UX.
I have lost track of the times when a stakeholder pulls out a mobile app (with 1/20th of the features our project include) and asks me “can our product look like this?”.
While the level of complexity we work with can be on a whole different level, I still think it is a fantastic goal, as “Consumer” UX isn’t all about the end product. It is also about the user-centric methods that are vital in an industry where a user’s opinion of a product is instrumental in their success. Just because we can get away with less usable experiences in Enterprise does not mean we should just assume the status quo when we feel that more could be done to fight for the user.
The cool thing about being the stragglers in a race is there is little to lose and tons to gain. Any success you achieve can be seen as a success for enterprise designers around the world! It’s pretty exciting to have that potential to elevate the reputation of a whole area of design.
I hope you enjoyed this piece. I love my current role as a UX designer for Enterprise IT solutions and just wanted to share some of the reasons why. However, that is not to say I don’t want to learn more about consumer UX (or other types of design!). Design for all products/services is amazing and each comes with its own set of challenges and rewards.
Most of what I wrote here are reflections of my personal experiences. Feel free to let me know if you have any feedback!
