Design: Enterprise UX Design

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses the key differences between UX design for enterprise applications and consumer applications. Among these differences is the fact that most enterprise users have their applications chosen for them, while consumers have freedom of choice and buy their own applications. While actual users may have the opportunity to define requirements for and evaluate enterprise applications, personas represent the target users of consumer applications, and the people who test them merely resemble those target users.

Enterprise applications typically have much greater scope and are much more complex than consumer applications, so enterprise solutions are often tailored for people working in specific roles. Plus, enterprise applications are designed for a specific business domain rather than a specific task, as many consumer applications are. Administrators usually configure enterprise applications, while consumers configure their own applications. Employees routinely use enterprise applications in their work, while the use of most consumer applications is less predictable. Enterprise applications often must connect with legacy systems. 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

Designing for usability and maximizing value delivery are UX design best practices. Building a useful, data-heavy user experience demands even more. Software engineers have achieved a remarkable feat in recent years: leveraging Big Data and data analytics to predict and prescribe users’ behavior. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning tools, we can gather huge amounts of data from various sources, enrich and analyze that data, then share the results visually on dashboards and in reports.

But visualizing data isn’t helpful if that data doesn’t make sense. So UX designers have traditionally used bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts to present data to users visually. Nevertheless, keeping user interfaces simple, focusing on clarity over style, and emphasizing what the user would consider important insights are timeless UX design best practices that can make data-heavy user experiences successful. In this article, I’ll highlight some UX design trends that are transforming data-heavy user interfaces into more insightful and less overwhelming user experiences. Read More