Experiences: Enterprise Experiences

Product sense. Product-minded. Product builder. These terms are often associated with our learnings as UX researchers in the field of enterprise software. The term product sense originated from the field of product management and refers to gaining a deep understanding of the product’s goals, business goals, and users to find opportunities to enhance the product experience.

As a UX researcher working within an embedded product team at an enterprise software company, I constantly collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders such as UX designers and product managers. Although we all have different job functions, we have a common North Star: building great products for our users. So what is product sense and how does it relate to UX research?

Product sense focuses on the intersection of the users, the design, and the business. Read More

What is an ERP system? Microsoft defines enterprise resource planning (ERP) as “a type of software system that helps organizations automate and manage core business processes for optimal performance. ERP software coordinates the flow of data between a company’s business processes, providing a single source of truth and streamlining operations across the enterprise.”

An organization can use enterprise resource–planning (ERP) software to meet many different corporate requirements, including accounting, sales, customer-relationship management (CRM), product management, and supply-chain management. However, without a unified UX design, users will struggle to use such systems to carry out their essential tasks. Regardless of your employees’ level of IT literacy, they should be able to utilize and comprehend the system quickly. Therefore, ensuring the success of ERP software requires its design using user-centered concepts. Read More

Enterprise software faces a number of UX challenges, including the following:

• Enterprise solutions often depend on integrations between multiple applications.
• Few of these applications were built with the intent of integrating them into a system that supports a cohesive user experience.

There is a profound lack of information on UX-research approaches that are suitable for exploring integration issues for enterprise software.

This article is Part 1 of a series in which I’ll examine several critical software-integration considerations from a UX perspective. In Part 1, I’ll focus on how to characterize users’ mental models of the data that underlie enterprise systems. In cases where an enterprise is integrating two or more applications that have disparate, back-end data sources, UX research should guide efforts to align those data sources to achieve a seamless user experience. This article outlines specific approaches for characterizing both the current and ideal workflows for viewing, adding, or modifying data across multiple applications. It also identifies success criteria for use when evaluating integrated user experiences. Read More