Experiences: Enterprise Experiences

The third annual Enterprise UX (EUX) conference opened on Wednesday, June 7, 2017, when a day of workshops convened at the Argonaut Hotel, which is located in the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park at Fisherman’s Wharf. The main conference took place Thursday, June 8, through Friday, June 9, at the Innovation Hangar in the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco’s Marina District.

Overall, Rosenfeld Media, the producer of this event, delivered a well thought out conference experience, with excellent content. I’m glad the organizers made attending EUX easy for me this year by moving the conference from San Antonio to San Francisco, which is a great city to visit. In recent years, one of my design goals has been the consumerization of enterprise software, so it was high time I attended this conference. Now that I have, I’m sorry I missed the first two. Read More

An intranet has the potential to unify a corporate culture, emphasize core company values, and develop a sense of community among employees, in addition to its basic function of providing access to documents and procedural information. Unfortunately, some intranets have simply grown organically, as collections of disjointed Web sites for different departments or document repositories for particular workgroups.

The key to intranet success is to provide value to employees and give them a reason to visit the site repeatedly. One of the primary ways to achieve this is to connect employees with the people and groups with whom they need to collaborate. Workgroups, or communities of practice, provide the basis for a living, growing, vibrant space in which people can access the information they need, share best practices, and contribute to a shared knowledge base. This article discusses the role of communities of practice within organizations and provides a framework for planning research and design activities to maximize their effectiveness. Read More

Over the past twenty years, the field of user experience has been fortunate. Software and hardware product organizations increasingly have adopted user-centered design methods such as contextual user research, usability testing, and iterative interaction design. In large part, this has occurred because the market has demanded it. More than ever, good interaction design and high usability are part of the price of entry to markets.

However, there’s one area that I believe has lagged behind: the enterprise software space. I can’t tell you how many frustratingly unusable enterprise Web applications I’ve encountered during my 12 plus years in corporate America. As important as the user experience of enterprise software is to a business’s success, why isn’t its assessment usually a factor in technology selection? Read More