A brief introduction to Enterprise

(and Industrial)

UXLarry Burks

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https://github.com/netplusdesign/enterprise-ux/issues

http://alistapart.com/article/ux-for-the-enterprise

Where I’m coming from

Financial

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IPL's

Government

Industrial

Industrial

What’s different?

Business

Technology

Users

UX

Consumer

Users

Technology

Business

Customers

Enterprise

Users

Technology

Business

Customers

Industrial

Engineers

Users

Technology

Business

Engineers

Consumer IoT

Customers and Users• Customers/buyers are generally not the ones that use the product, but

they are the decision maker

• Users don’t have the budget or the decision, but they influencers

• Other auxiliary users, customer support, resellers, managers, administrators… have different goals

• Smaller, more focused audiences defined by what they do, not by marketing category

• Sometimes very accessible (and opinionated)

User adoption• Adoption is often required, not optional

• Even when required, people will find work-arounds

• When workarounds are removed, service tickets increase

• The end result is business does not see the benefits

• These are some of the biggest problems & opportunities in enterprise software

Time scale• Social media

• Reading or composing email

• Design or presentation tools

• Enterprise users can spend their entire work day using a single product. Your product. Under repetitive, stressful conditions.

8 or 12 hours

Content vs Function

• What is the goal of Facebook? Or Twitter, NYTimes, Amazon?

• What is the goal of Excel? Or AutoCad, InDesign? Concur?

• Content is input, functionality is the focus

• Goal is to make it easy to get content in and manipulate it for an outcome

Design is not enough• A business person that gets design

is rare. More rare is the designer that gets the business.

• Enterprise apps are built using a much wider variety of hardware and software. Just knowing HTML is not enough.

• This learning process takes years a lifetime

Learn the businessQuestions to ask yourself

• Why is the company doing this project? Regulatory? Risk mitigation? Process automation or internal cost reduction?

• How does the business intend to make money from this project?

• Is there a sequence of steps or process to complete a transaction, or case or commission a piece of equipment?

• Is the process defined purely by business necessity? How can user needs influence the process?

Why is it important?

• Helps you ask better questions when doing user research

• Helps build trust with users and stakeholders

• Helps to explain design decisions in terms the business understands

Learn the technology• Learn how software is made

• Learn the lingo (git, commit, push, pull, pull request, unit tests…)

• The more complex the technical solution, the more difficult it will be to influence the experience

• Developers in large organizations know even less about working with designers

• There is unlikely to be any specialized front-end developers

• The UI may not be HTML at all

Why is it important?

• Understand the consequences of design choices

• Helps build trust with development team

• Helps to explain design decisions in terms developers understand

Requirements• Funding and scoping a project starts with requirements

• Who gets to write the requirements? (Business Analysts)

• What do the requirements look like?

• How easy are they to understand?

• Visualizing requirements

x 1,200x 1,000,000

Project scale• Enterprise apps can sometimes have 100s of screens or functions and maybe only

a few hundred or few thousand users

• Scale of development can influence amount of documentation and the number of developers, teams, locations, and the price tag

• Scale can complicate and slow decision making

• Time is money. If you have 200,000 users performing a task 20 x a day that takes 2 minutes instead of 1. That’s 66,666 hours of lost productivity in 1 day. Multiply by days, weeks, hourly rate… $$$

• Not all screens can be ‘designed’, they can be the result of combining many different modules

https://medium.com/ge-design/ges-predix-design-system-8236d47b0891#.wblv8ipdj

GE’s Predix Design System

Design• Designing a design system

• Less wireframing, more composing from kit of parts

• Sometimes low-fidelity is not your friend

• Unique design patterns

• Use real data!

Usability testing• No Lorum Ipsum!

• New paradigms and new processes are hard to test

• Customers time may be very valuable

• Customers are the gate keepers to end users

• Users may give feedback they think their manager wants to hear

• Actual users invested in the outcome of a product can give invaluable feedback

Usability testing for Industrial

• App is too complex to do quick tests

• Testing often requires realtime data and process simulation

• Measuring trust (in automation)

Distributed Teams• Global - Your projects may include many remote offices.

You may not have any co-located team members.

• Face time is an essential component to building trust. Get on a plane often ;-)

• Languages / timezones

• Working with remote teams often says how much documentation you will need to produce

• Every time you start a new project, you have to teach the team what you do and why it is valuable

Make yourself usable.

Business or Technology• Working for the business means

• you are closer to where the decisions are made

• easier access to customers and users

• may be easier to influence the direction of the product or process

• Working for technology means

• more likely to have the design executed as you intended

• easier to influence the process by which the product is built

• harder to get access to users for research and testing

• End of day, you have to make it work either way, and with re-orgs you may find yourself switching sides

If hired by the business it’s likely they are not getting what they want from tech.

EUX as a career

Skill AssessmentInteraction Design

Information Architecture

Visual Design

Visualization

User Research

Usability Testing

Prototyping

Recent graduate Sought after conference speaker

Engage Stakeholders

Earn trust

Prioritize efforts

Understand business quickly

Balance biz/buyer/user/tech needs

Recent graduate Sought after conference speaker

Enterprise UXBa

se U

X

Skills and Experience• Complex (more than a shopping cart) business processes

• Functional, workflow or transactional experience

• Analysis - decision support

• T-shaped (deep in at least one business domain)

• Can articulate a design in terms that business and technology people can understand

• Ability to play well with others and lead undercover

• Looking for the right fit

Get comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”

[But this is how we might find out.]

How to build EUX skills?• Research

• Personal projects

• Find some data and try to visualize it, quantified-self data

• Find a manual process you do today and design a UI for it

• Find a horrible device UI and design a mobile app for it (ex. programmable thermostat or switch)

• Build a small app and host it in Github

• Conferences - Tech, IoT, Maker, Enterprise UX

How to find EUX work?• Find a way to make it easy to switch jobs

• Don’t be afraid of taking a job in a new domain for less money. Remember scarcity of resources in economic theory.

• How you talk about your portfolio is more important than your actual portfolio

• Talk to a recruiter, hopefully with some design or UX expertise

• Go to conferences

Questions to ask• What do your products do?

• Who are the users? Who are the buyers?

• Is this a position on the business side or tech side?

• Are you looking for someone with domain experience, or willing to train?

• What does the team look like? What is the experience and background of the manager?

• Who defines the requirements? Is there an opportunity to work at this stage of projects?

• How long have you been practicing Scrum or Lean methods?

Are they just looking for a visual designer or

front-end developer?

Do they have realistic expectations? Are they looking for a unicorn?

Is this a good fit for me?• EUX is not for everyone

• Long ramp-up time, challenging subject matter

• The pace of work can be fast, but lots of starts and stops, long tangents, pivots

• Must have patience and lot’s of curiosity about the business behind the products

• Must enjoy working on deep, hard, usually vague problems

Good EUX Reads

Uday Gajendarhttps://medium.com/@udanium/why-i-design-enterprise-ux-fa74e9f12671#.rpdl6tsuq

Jordan Koscheihttp://alistapart.com/article/ux-for-the-enterprise

Good business/tech reads• Creativity, Inc.

• The Phoenix Project

• Scrum, Jeff Sutherland

• Team of Teams

• The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership

• Start with Why

• The Idea Factory

• Algorithms to Live By

• Rise of the Robots

• Thanks for the Feedback

• The Power of Habit

• Holacracy

• Bold

@uphillhouse

www.linkedin.com/in/larry-burks-ux