Why Enterprise UX is Important
Enterprise UX may be one of the most under-appreciated parts of any modern business. Millions of businesses across the globe now use software and digital products for internal communication and processes. Good enterprise UX facilitates and streamlines processes that could otherwise have been neglected.
Designers can directly increase the ROI of enterprise digital products by making it easier, therefore more efficient, for internal teams to use.
There has been an increased focus on UX design in recent years, with businesses realising the importance of improving the usability of their products. Most recently, the attention has shifted internally to enterprise UX, which has often been criticised for a lack of attention to end-user satisfaction. Businesses are realising the importance of a good employee experience, which can directly affect productivity.
Enhanced awareness and focus on enterprise UX gives businesses the opportunity to greatly increase motivation, efficiency, and ease of collaboration. In this article, we will explore reasons why enterprise UX is important and teach you how to effectively use enterprise applications to bolster productivity.
What Is Enterprise UX?
Defining enterprise UX is actually quite simple: it's the design of digital products for people at work. It's important to note that enterprise UX isn't limited to internal corporate systems.It is an expansive medium, extending into many different areas. At its core, however, enterprise UX should be used to help workers perform their tasks by streamlining internal processes and simplifying protocols.
Why Is Enterprise UX important?
During enterprise application product development projects, enterprise UX often takes a back seat. Designers and developers tend to focus on product functionality, while the end-user experience is frequently ignored. Everything from task management systems, HR portals, intranet, and CRMs tend to be developed for purpose rather than designed with the end user (employee) in mind. This leaves frustrated employees having to deal with badly designed systems that are counterintuitive and nonsensical.
Executives are waking up to the importance of effective enterprise UX design and are investing more time, effort, and money into nurturing and facilitating internal processes. Employees are quickly becoming the perfect testing ground for new enterprise software design, because they bring unique perspectives to the table and can test and examine tools and offer valuable feedback to their employers.
The Difference Between Consumer UX and Enterprise UX
Consumer UX
Customer Experience (CX) is the overall experience a consumer has with a company/brand, digital (eg. purchase journey, after sale email) or real world (eg. customer service phone call). CX is generally created for and geared towards the general public.
The goal of consumer UX is to enhance user satisfaction. Empathy, ethics, and usability are all employed to measure the success of a product. The end goal is to make consumers happily pay for and love the product, making it become an essential part of daily life. The takeaway here is that consumers could easily choose a different solution. This means that intuitive UX designs are key to the continued success of a product.
Enterprise UX
Enterprise UX is often different because it is applied to the internal software of a business and is principally used by its employees to streamline processes.
Generally, enterprise UX users don't get a choice in the solution and it's often left to heavy-handed decision-makers who only care about the bottom line. This practice hurts businesses in the long term who suffer from badly designed systems that are counterintuitive. Cutting corners only serves to frustrate and demotivate employees who will likely have a significant reduction in performance and productivity as a direct result.
There are a further two differences between the types of UX design and can be categorised as follows:
Scale
When thinking about scale, UX designers usually have access to key information about their target audience. Gender, age, and occupation all play an important role in defining the characteristics of the project. Usually, the scalability of a software product isn't known until it's launched on the market, which can cause a fair amount of uncertainty.
Landscape
When a project's landscape is studied, comprehensive market research is used to gather important data, but it doesn't identify or specify the individuals or groups that will use a particular product.
Designing Enterprise Software
When it comes to designing enterprise UX software, the user group is known from the outset. This means that the team working on the enterprise UX design will know how to develop a competent solution. Making use of all available data is important at this stage, because the scaling is limited to the projected size of the business.
The Role Of End Users
Exceeding user expectations is the most important part of enterprise UX design. Consumer-oriented products are all steered by user expectations, pain points, and feedback. It's in the decision-maker's interest to have intuitive products that serve a useful purpose. Simply put, if a user's needs aren't considered or met, then the product will automatically be deemed a failure and will receive fewer sales or downloads.
Enterprise UX is used by businesses to transform expansive digital processes. In some cases, usability isn't high up on the design priorities and can hurt internal productivity. Employees are the end-users of enterprise UX and, in general, rarely consulted about corporate business systems. End-user feedback is an imperative basis for successful enterprise UX and allows for internal software application improvements to be made relatively easily.
Decision-makers tend to have a skewed view of internal software systems and sometimes make judgments based on functional and top-level project management requirements. They rarely take into consideration the design and usability factors, which can leave some employees feeling resentful. Some internal systems have been described as being clunky, sluggish, and hard to use.
Why UX Is Key To Enterprise Software
In the short term, businesses can save money by focusing on product functionality, with little interest in usability for the end-user. But doing so means that more is lost over time and the advantages that quality UX design brings are lost.
Here are the reasons why enterprise UX should be an important part of your business model.
Better Productivity
Executives tend to cut corners and try to save money when investing in enterprise digital products, this usually means cutting the design budget and ultimately the user experience of the product. A well-thought-out enterprise software design can benefit your business in the long term and produce a greater cumulative return over time. Corporate software that is easy to use assists employees in completing routine tasks. This helps to boost productivity and motivation, which inevitably leads to greater profits.
Better Understanding Of Data
In the digital age, vast swathes of data need to be internally processed on a daily basis. Effective enterprise UX can collate, understand and interpret data in record time. Key insights are the most important part of crunching data. When corporate solutions are identified with the end-user needs in mind, insights are much easier to identify.
Crucial UX elements such as dashboards, data visualisation, and user journeys are all used to discern information with minimal effort.
Simplified Internal Structures
Effective cooperation is one of the simplest ways to garner success in a group activity. Workflows are no different but development teams have sometimes been known to build corporate software without heeding the basics of enterprise UX.
Good enterprise UX design considers the overall behaviour of the employees within an organisation while assessing micro-actions that make teamwork reflexive and easy. Enterprise UX designers need to make sure that the interactions they create in their software systems are autonomous and relate to our real-life environments.
Conclusion
In the digital age, effective UX design is more important than ever before, especially for corporate software. It provides inherent value and goes a lot further than you might think. When end-user needs are taken into consideration, productivity increases as a direct result. This directly impacts a business's profits and allows for processes to be further streamlined in the future.
Good enterprise UX design can also be used to work with and collate big data. This, in turn, allows employees to collaborate constructively and find new ways of working. Investing in practical enterprise UX is a surefire way to strengthen and reinforce internal processes whilst maximising productivity at the same time.
Businesses that have adopted successful enterprise UX strategies are 50% more likely to have employees that take an active role in pushing further and maximising revenue streams.
WQA provides supercharged digital product development for growth driven companies around the world. Working with Startups, Scale-ups and Enterprise, we design, build and scale digital products, experiences and platforms used by millions of people.
If you want to learn more about a scaled approach to UX design that works for enterprises, you can chat to us or email us for a conversation and assessment of your unique digital context.