UX for enterprise applications !

From the last few years there is a big change in the enterprise applications, I call it ‘the apple effect’. All the applications, be it consumer or enterprise have been benefited by this effect. Enterprise applications for years took the user for granted and served bulky and complicated applications. Today with the availability of competing applications and flexibility to switch between them have forced enterprises to change the way enterprise applications are being designed and take users more seriously. Along with the applications providing clear usability and efficiency of the design; learnability and the ability of the application to delight the users is becoming an important criterion for decision makers behind selecting any enterprise application.

To design an enterprise application that sells itself, focus it around the user. Improving user experience and user productivity go hand in hand. Despite providing the most powerful feature set to users, unless it is targeted to enhance user productivity and improve the user experience it will not add any business value. The challenge of balancing the user needs and business impact is huge but if you get it right you get the much-needed competitive advantage. Please find top 5 most important aspects for design user experience for enterprises.

Focus — Break down the whole application by users. Identify the key personas that would interact with an application. Analyze the pain points and motivation for that persona. Gather persona specific requirements and create user stories which will address all the pain points and cover motivations for the persona to use the application. Personas and user stories will define the user flows. A clickable wireframe to depict this user flow is very important. A lot of potential bottlenecks can be identified from these wireframes and fixed in advanced saving massing development time and effort.

Teamwork — The most important thing about enterprise products is you first must get a buy in from internal teams first and then external users. After you identify individual personas, the next step is to weave all the personas together in a consistent application. Ensure that the right team is involved during focusing on the personas and integrating these personas. This helps application identify team specific needs early and customer it to buy in the team’s loyalty. While designing a user experience, involve software engineers, visual designers, content creators, marketing specialists, user researchers, and many others. Early involvement from teams creates a sense of ownership and attachment which is very important for an enterprise application during development and support.

• Delight– The aim of the user experience is to delight the users. To delight the users, ensure to avoid the pitfall of following all the latest UI/UX trends. There is no point adding latest colors, unnecessary animations, complex menu grids and redundant notifications. Understand the corporate guidelines and innovate with designs. Provide dashboards which would read the effectiveness between the application and underlying business goals. Add value by simplifying user flows, reducing learning time for users. Give your users reasons to stay on and use your products longer and constantly measure feedback against these reasons.
• Scalability– Scalability is the need of the hour considering the global landscape every application is pitching itself in, scalability has become an integral part of design. Build your application for growth and design it for the future. Address all kinds of potential growth in advance. The user experience should not get affected by scaling users, data, features, integrations and product/services up or down.
• Business impact– The best thing about any enterprise application is when it’s designed to align with business goals. Now ensure that internal users as well as external users are equipped with the necessary capabilities that align the user actions to business goals. The enterprise is as successful as it’s every user using their application to perform their functions. The ultimate goal is to help organizations meet their goals by enabling every employee on the application to perform to his or her best ability.

Partnering with an experts can help you design and re-design the user experience for your enterprise applications.

Link to my Original article — https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ux-enterprise-applications-2018-sarvadnya-arjunwadkar/