Designing in the enterprise can feel like fighting a hydra.
Outdated processes. Unavoidable politics. A culture that feels almost immune to design.
Designers need to overcome all of the above before they even start to tackle the difficult task of creating clear products capable of complex tasks.
To address the multi-layered challenge of enterprise design, we spoke with a select group of UX designers across a variety of industries. We asked them to focus on the most pressing challenge they face and describe their own solutions.
These are their stories. For more advice, you can also check out Part 2 where designers from Salesforce, Crazyegg, 3M, and Core Logic describe their best practices.
Table of Contents
- 1. Gaining more access to end-users
- Jack Moffett – Manager of Apps Development, Inmedius (a Boeing company)
- Solutions
- 2. Breaking down the silos
- Anita Cheng – IA/UX Developer, City of Los Angeles (Dept of Building and Safety)
- Solutions
- 3. Seeing the elephant
- Dave Malouf – Principal UX Strategist, HPE Helion
- Solutions
1. Gaining more access to end-users
Jack Moffett – Manager of Apps Development, Inmedius (a Boeing company)
The greatest challenge I currently face is gaining access to our users. When a UX team is embedded within an enterprise context, one must work through multiple layers of bureaucracy to get to the end-users.
- Get approval from the UX team’s management. I’m not referring to the UX manager, but the manager (or multiple managers) above her.
- Get approval from the project manager.
- Get approval from the customer management. In large enterprise corporations, a different division of the organization is still referred to as a customer. This may require a chain of approvals as well.
With so many stakeholders, you can run into several roadblocks, but it usually comes down to money.
How much time will the users be “non-productive”, and is there a timecode they can bill to? Are there travel expenses for the UX team members? Whose budget is this coming out of? Can’t you do it over WebEx?
Solutions
We are starting small, conducting a series of 1-hour, remote focus groups.
We invite developers, managers, and testers so they will see and understand the value of the feedback. As we build better products with the feedback, we will receive approval for more involved usability studies.
In concert, my team has started tracking our User Exposure Hours against the minimum suggested by Jared Spool in his article, Fast Path to a Great UX – Increased Exposure Hours, which is 2 hours every 6 weeks. This metric helps us explain the issue to management and track our progress as we improve.
I encourage my team to value our progress, rather than to be discouraged about our current imperfections.
2. Breaking down the silos
Anita Cheng – IA/UX Developer, City of Los Angeles (Dept of Building and Safety)
They definitely don’t teach you in any UX classes how to handle silos.
When you’re working with large systems, no one person knows all of the answers. Your users won’t be in one place, the requirements won’t be in one place, the code probably won’t be in one place either.
Gathering all the information you need is even harder in an organization where a UX process is totally new, like a government entity.
Solutions
Build trust incrementally.
To get the information you need, your managers/stakeholders need to entrust you with people who can help (Users, developers, subject matter experts, etc.). If you don’t gain their trust, they won’t give you the information you need. No good UX is possible in that environment.
Sometimes you need to prove your proficiency by going at things a little backwards, such as producing prototypes and iterating with preliminary user research. Then as the organization trusts you more with each iteration, they give you more and more resources that you need to make the product even better.
It isn’t a perfect system, but little consistent steps over time adds up to a lot of progress in an industry where UX is sorely needed.
3. Seeing the elephant
Dave Malouf – Principal UX Strategist, HPE Helion
As the proverb goes, 8 blind monks separately interpret their piece of a elephant quite differently.
Enterprises are all about scale. Scale isn’t a mountain though. Mountains are easy. Scale for enterprises are river systems like the Amazon, Nile, Mississippi where any single source can impact anything along the way.
Things shift, dialog, mutate, converge, diverge, etc. No amount of user research, or value validation processes can really work when you have ecosystems at this level of scale.
Solutions
Set up reflexive processes that allow systems to adapt over time based on feedback loops that monitor customer metrics.
These reflexive processes can include simple things like monitoring dashboards against analytics of the system. Based on where the analytics indicate user friction, you can conduct intervention interviews with users at these key touchpoints.
Applications like Intercom go a long way in helping you make these types of connections. However, these types of systems only work for SaaS or other publicly available applications.
For the world I’m in where your software is behind customer firewalls, you need other types of analytics that are bit more human. Keep in close relationship with account & support teams. Attend customer meetings with your team. Send out surveys to end users as they allow, etc.
To be open, tune in to all of your “senses”. The more instruments you have running, the more you defuzz your elephant. Only then will UX have real strategic value inside the organization.