Column: Enterprise UX

As the title of my column Enterprise UX suggests, I typically share insights for UX professionals working within large enterprise environments, which provides material for diverse topics. However, with COVID-19 shaking up everyone’s lives in 2020, I thought I’d shake up my final column of the year a bit by injecting some fun into it. (We could all use a little more of that, right?)

This fall, as I sought opportunities to facilitate constructive play with my two sons and reduce their screen time and mine, I discovered inspiration in a box of LEGO® toys—specifically, the building instructions that came with it. As I read through the booklet, I found myself comparing its simple, effective workflow to the experiences that UX designers endeavor to create. So, in this column, I’ll share some inspirational lessons that I learned and provide some ideas for how you can apply them in your own work. Read More

You’ve probably heard the popular saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. As UX design professionals, we make our living by communicating clearly through the use of visual elements and affordances, thus, enabling the productivity of others. If we do our job well, we seldom need to rely on using many words. Instead, the visualization skills that we hone through our profession benefit not only the users of the products we design; if we leverage them correctly, they also make our colleagues, stakeholders, and ourselves more productive.

Productive teams are typically teams that communicate well and have a shared understanding of what they’re trying to accomplish. Their shared understanding often stems from expressing their ideas and concepts in unique ways that gain stronger footholds in the minds of others, which fuels the team’s greater productivity. While there are many methods of expressing ideas and concepts that could aid our productivity, we’ve found that creating mind maps is one of the most effective techniques because of its versatility and scalability. Read More

Has a developer or stakeholder ever informed you that your user-interface (UI) design deliverables were oversimplifying things or were portraying systems and workflows differently from the way they actually worked at a programmatic level? Perhaps they criticized you for creating order on top of the chaotic underpinnings of the systems or for willfully streamlining technical tasks whose completion they assumed to be the responsibility of users—who might not readily understand them. I’ve encountered such scenarios numerous times throughout my career. Often, the people offering such criticisms were correct: the user interfaces I had designed did not truly reflect the underlying system they represented. Of course, this was intentional on my part.

Human beings are hardwired to respond to stories—not complex systems. As I described in my column “Telling a Story Through Your UX Portfolio,” by building narrative into your portfolio, you can make a more resounding impact on interview teams than simply by reciting facts. Similarly, the people who use the user interfaces we design can better comprehend the workflows, interactive cues, and calls to action (CTAs) of those interfaces when we build narrative into them. Moreover, you can deliberately create narrative, which is beneficial to the people who use software systems because their perceptions of the systems often do not reflect the way the systems work. Read More