When UX Hits the Fan
Guest Contribution
User-centric Design Challenges in Enterprise
Innovation in large scale is never possible without an army of designers, developers, and product managers. To my knowledge what determines success or failure for a company in the tech sector is the speed in which the company ships its products and gets into the market first of its other competitors.
But shit goes wrong all the time, and when it does, it is easy for decision-makers to blame each other and then think of UX as a cosmetic part of the process. These decision makers might argue “as long as it works, it is good enough”, however, I argue it is not enough in today’s market.
Users are the center of any successful products, and if their experience with the product is not a head and shoulder above your competitors it takes less than a minute or few seconds to switch to your competitor. The user has almost zero tolerance when it comes to laggy and dumb interfaces.
Those who have an enterprise solution and want to get users to do a trial know that not every user finishes the signup process. Doesn’t matter if you are offering it for free, if the effort is much more than expected, you will lose one potential customer. Every micro interaction counts toward making the next decision and eventually finishing the task.
Here are 3 problems you may encounter in enterprise UX and suggestions to try.
Problem of Consensus
Enterprise companies are large in scale and have tiers of multidisciplinary teams. This means the real challenge is to bring all the stakeholders on the same page. This often causes to swing from having trouble achieving consensus in a timely fashion to designing by committee.
How to fix this:
- Learn the arts of stakeholdering. Involve stakeholders early on in the process and get buy-in. Try to understand them more than their name and where they sit. Learn what are their goals, and what are their challenges in achieving them.
- Take ownership of your work and avoid waiting for consensus as much as you can (You are the expert in your field! ACT AS ONE)
Lack of Design Culture
Large companies might lack a product or design culture. This is different from the organizational culture. This is specified in terms of how the company thinks about design and innovation. While the company has designers and creative workers, but they are not embedded into the larger process. Their job is mainly to deliver assets to developers to make the interface.
How to fix this:
- Show stakeholders how a user-centered approach can help the company by providing case studies. Find examples where a small change in an interface or process had positive effects. Use insights you have from UX research efforts such as analytics, usability testing etc, to create a strong rationale.
- Indirectly educate stakeholders and spread user-centered awareness. One idea is to host UX lunch and learn events in the office, where you show the most important things you discovered about user or ideas that can advocate better user experience. [I will make another post to explain how to run a UX lunch and learn]
Process of Approval
The larger the company the slower it might move. Complicated approval process and documentation, deadly deadlines etc. often forces the process to cut short crucial aspects of design and shortcuts are never good for a user-centric approach.
How to fix this:
- Operate like a start-up. Be agile and find workarounds.
- Get in touch early on with senior stakeholders and let them know why certain things need to be done.
- Have a plan B. Have priority for your interface implementation. Let the developers know which features are absolutely critical for UX. At the end of the day, it is better to get it done than aiming for perfection.
https://medium.com/media/96d08ab34921bdd17986cb5c0396842f/href
When UX Hits the Fan was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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