Fighting for UX Design in the Enterprise

Working as a UX designer in the enterprise world can be challenging, but the experience can also be fun and rewarding. If you enjoy solving complex problems and function well in an environment with well-defined boundaries, enterprise UX could be right up your alley.

Having worked on a design team in a large corporation for the past four years, I’ll share tips and observations for more successful design amidst the politics and complex workflows.

Knowing Your Users in the Flesh

Many enterprise companies, including ones that build consumer products, have also established a presence in the B2B space. This means their software is used by very specific, and sometimes narrow, groups of industry professionals.

For example, UX designers work on projects ranging from medical software, to e-commerce platforms, to HR portals. Because these tools support a defined process, doing thorough initial research is crucial to designing a successful application.

No matter how much prior knowledge you have about the field, working on a B2B application dictates a steep learning curve. On the plus side, most enterprises have a well-defined relationship with their clients. You can leverage this relationship to get in contact with users to do field studies and interviews.

Photo credit: Nicholas Wang. Creative Commons.

One of the best ways to gather information about users is through immersion. Spending a couple of days in their workplace reveals wealth of information about their physical and social environment, tools they use, and all the nuanced responsibilities. You can watch your application in action and interview users shortly afterwards, which provides valuable insights into how what you can streamline. While moderated usability testing sessions in a lab or remote setting are still helpful, nothing beats watching how users interact with the product in a realistic setting (especially if you bring your team along).

For example, one of the companies I worked for built applications for ambulance paramedics. As part of their job, paramedics are expected not only to treat transported patients, but also collect and record their contact and insurance information. This task was challenging because of the stressful and fast-paced work conditions.

Photo credit: NEC Corporation of America. Creative Commons.

To put ourselves in users’ shoes, my team actually spent a day riding in an ambulance to observe medics respond to 911 calls. It was eye-opening to find out how many responsibilities paramedics juggled in the little time they had. We learned that filling out patient reports was secondary to taking care of the patient and it was often done with many interruptions. Every second counted, so we had to create a stripped-down interface featuring information in bite-sized chunks, clear color contrast, and highly legible text.

Surviving the Dangers of UX Complexity

Complexity has become synonymous with enterprise software and it stems from legacy business processes. Users of enterprise applications are busy professionals who have important jobs and they can no longer accomplish these jobs within Excel or Google Docs. They look to enterprise application vendors for more powerful tools that don’t further complicate their work.

 

Image credit: Sacha Chua. Creative Commons.

From the previously mentioned paramedic example, it becomes clear that most workflows involve multiple steps and interactions with others. While designers might not have the power to simplify these workflows, we can create applications that align with users’ goals in the most intuitive ways.

One of the ways to tackle complexity is to break the process down into key steps and analyze the purpose of each step. This approach brings redundancy and duplication to light and informs decisions about how to best prioritize functionality. As discussed in another post, simplify your user flows before you design anything.

Understand the dangers of perceived complexity, which does not reflect how complex the software really is, but how complex it looks to the user. Reducing perceived complexity makes the interface feel simple and familiar, giving users the confidence in their own ability to learn and use the application. There are many ways to minimize perceived complexity by relying on progressive disclosure, reducing visual noise, and reusing the same elements to minimize the learning curve.

Capitalizing on Teamwork

Unlike startups where designers work in many different capacities, responsibilities are clearly differentiated in big organizations. This translates into a larger number of people who work with a UX designer and have a say in the final product. Most likely, you will be partnering with project managers, software engineers, visual designers, content creators, marketing specialists, user researchers, and many others.

Photo credit: Johannes van Assem. Creative Commons.

On the upside, you have a larger pool of experts to draw on. Each of these specialists uses their knowledge to help you solve problems outside of your area of expertise. For example, a visual designer will take care of fonts, colors, and graphic assets, while you can focus on your part of the project (perhaps that’s the overall UX design, or just the interaction design).

For more tips on collaborative design, check out the free Design Collaboration in the Enterprise: Building the Foundation of Brilliance ebook.

On the downside, engaging with multiple stakeholders adds steps to the design process and slows down decision making. When the slightest change, such as replacing an icon or removing a tooltip, requires a blessing from another team member, the project does not move forward until all approvals are received. Added wait times are dangerous because they stall the team and offset timelines. Also, be prepared for lengthy discussions with a lot of opinions tossed around the room. Even though everyone’s input is important, you will be exercising your ability to moderate these conversations and make hard decisions to avoid design by committee.

Here’s a few tips to smooth out the process:

Start broad, then narrow down — In early brainstorming sessions, you want as much input as possible from everyone on the team. But once you’ve gathered all the ideas, only the core product team should decide which ones make the cut.


Explain design decisions as business decisions — If you want to be taken seriously, you must know how to express design as a vehicle for growing the business. For example, instead of explaining how a minimalist interface reduces visual noise, take it a step further and talk about how it focuses user attention to improve conversions.


Master the art of feedback — Understand that feedback is negotiation. Feel free to give feedback on other people’s feedback, relying on your own user research and usability testing results to justify decisions. People are much less likely to argue with facts than with design principles.

 

Photo credit: UXPin

In the example above from a Yelp redesign exercise, notice how UXPin CEO Marcin Treder proactively describes his thought process for even the simplest of design decisions. Using the live commenting tool, the two other team members are both able to quickly provide feedback without resorting to dragged-out email chains.

Based on the advice, the next step here is for Marcin to respond to Jerry and explain why high color contrast isn’t always the default solution, especially if your interface already uses vibrant colors. He’ll want to tie it back to the business value: a high-contrast button might be reserved for the “Sign Up” call-to-action, which deserves to stand out for the sake of conversions.

Embracing New UX Projects & Responsibilities

UX practitioners who work for Fortune 500 companies never have a shortage of work. The abundance of projects ranges from brand new initiatives to redesigning and improving existing products. In addition, there’s likely to be ongoing work on pattern libraries, process optimization, and team building.

Photo credit: Ubuntu Pattern Library

Redesign efforts are commonplace because most large companies already have established products. The reasons behind the redesign vary: adding new functionality, giving product a facelift, updating the technology behind the scenes, and so on. A redesign project is an opportunity for the UX designer to shine because ditching the old convoluted interface and rethinking the workflow to be more intuitive makes a positive impact on a lot of people who use the application on the daily basis.

Even the most conservative of corporations are facing pressure from startups and tech giants to shift from an engineering-driven culture to a design-centric culture. Companies with established UX culture set up their own “labs” dedicated to research and experimentation with new tools. While that’s good news for designers, it also means that you need to develop more than just design skills to stand out: 

Be a master facilitator — Great design requires great processes. Know how to moderate the design studio sessions described in The Guide to UX Design Process & Documentation. Conduct stakeholder interviews. Whatever you do, don’t just sit back and design or else you’re not offering up your real value, which is injecting design into the company culture itself.


Think like a scientist — Designers who can’t interpret data well will fade into obscurity. Understand how to use common analytics tools like Google Analytics so you can have more meaningful discussions with marketers and business analysts. Hone your ability to balance that quantitative data with qualitative user feedback. Understand that good design isn’t about finding the best solution, it’s discovering the right problem and building accordingly.


Build out your T-skills — Specialize in one specific UI or UX field, but understand its implications on every other profession. You don’t need to be an SEO or HTML master, but you must understand how design decisions impact everything on the back-end.

Source: UXPin based on Distilled

Taking the Next Step

When you take design out of its “black box”, you’ll find that others become more receptive to new approaches. It might feel counterintuitive since you might fear being devalued by revealing the curtain, but the opposite is actually true. Know your user, interpret their behavior like a scientist, then share that knowledge with the whole team. Meanwhile, understand that you also need to empathize with your coworkers just as you empathize with users.

If you’d like to practice what you’ve learned, feel free to give UXPin a try.

I’ve played around with its collaborative design features and found them quite helpful for visualizing design problems and gathering feedback from different teams. It certainly helps cut back on all the email chains (which are plenty in large corporations). Going from an idea to prototype in a single tool also helps reduce documentation since stakeholders can see the entire process unfold with automated notifications. When you work in an enterprise environment with plenty of product requirements and technical requirements, it always helps to reduce the busywork.