Column: Enterprise UX

In Part 1 of this three-part series, I wrote that the quality of leadership extends to individual contributors and described some behaviors that I have observed in individual contributors who have earned the respect of their superiors and the emulation of their peers. In Part 2, I described additional behaviors that individual contributors who others perceive as leaders consistently exhibit.

Now, in Part 3, I’ll wrap up this series by presenting the following additional behaviors:

• mastering self-discipline
• demonstrating self-awareness
• projecting confidence
• being humble
• exuding passion Read More

Many articles about UX leadership focus on what managers do or target those who have direct reports. Such articles typically cover building a UX culture, hiring the right people, developing people, and of course, selling the value of User Experience to the C-suite. While these are all valuable pursuits that are vitally important to building a user-centered culture in your company, leadership does not end with directors, managers, or even team leads. Leadership extends to individual contributors, too. In fact, depending on your company’s UX maturity level, leadership arguably begins with individual contributors—perhaps you, the UX designer.

Unfortunately, UX designers are often in short supply in large enterprise environments, in comparison to people in information technology, engineering, and marketing roles. This, in turn, perpetuates scenarios in which UX designers must be, in equal parts, practitioners, evangelists, and presenters—roles that together exceed the scope of what most UX designers expect they’ll need to do when they first embark on their career. However, being a leader also means cultivating skills that may go beyond the bounds of your craft. But what does leadership really look like for people in creative roles who don’t have any direct reports, lack easy access to the C-suite, and have not had a multi-decade tenure at their company? Read More

What do you think of when you hear the term enterprise UX? Designing corporate Human Resources (HR) systems or intranets? Many articles and books for UX professionals focus on designing Web sites and mobile applications for consumers. But what about the silent majority of users in the workplace who are trying to get their job done? Many of them think of enterprise software as the generally sub-par tools that companies force them to use.

However, over the past few years, enterprise UX has started to get more attention from user-experience thought leaders. (There’s even a conference dedicated to it.) But what does enterprise UX actually mean? From what we’ve observed, it seems that there is not yet an agreed-upon definition of this term. This fuels confusion about enterprise UX, why it matters, and what scope it encompasses. Therefore, in our first column on this topic, we’ll

• provide a working definition of enterprise UX
• describe a few of the many environments in which enterprise UX makes a difference
• identify obstacles to designing and developing great enterprise software Read More