Enterprise UX?

Hey guys, after a lot of self training and teaching, I was able to finally make it to a UX designer job. Yaaay! Thanks for all the resources, feedback and the awesome community by UX mastery :blush:

Now what?

Guess what? Shit just got real. I joined a company that is focused on Enterprise level UX. Although I did work in the past but not as a core UX guy in some small startups, I entered the world of UX in an Enterprise level, Iā€™m finding it super hard to find some examples and mentorship for EUX. I think as a beginner I read and worked on examples that were far different from the actual enterprise UX. I think I have my basics right but when the PM talks about his requirements, Im going blank :cry: Iā€™m not sure what should I be doing :no_mouth: Is it because of an imposter syndrome? Is it because my self training was just not upto the mark? Im not sure. Im not even finding good resources for Enterprise application examples. Am I the only one who is struggling on this? :frowning: Thoughts and help please :astonished:

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I could-- and probably should-- write a whole book on EUX. Iā€™ve spent a lot of time developing internal sites and features.

Without sharing any protected information, can you give an example of one or two of your projects?

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Hi. Iā€™m working as an UX strategist for Enterprise in Thailand. To make sure UX donā€™t suffer from Enterprise atmosphere, I talk with the big boss and make sure heā€™s IN TO UX. The sign is when everytime we meet he sometime bring up UX topic he found today.

After that you can point out whatā€™s in this enterprise is not so UX! After that you let him do it and wait for better result :slight_smile:

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Can you guys please clarify exactly what you mean by ā€˜Enterprise UXā€™?

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Hi @imsaif, I am not sure if the brief or requirements would be too difficult but if you could share briefly about the nature of the work without disclosing confidential information that would allow us to help you.

If this helps Iā€™d be happy to share a little about the work my team did. A lot of the features our design and experience developed requires a balance when it comes to meeting business and design requirements. From a business point of view the set of features (Though not all) developed should create value for paid customers and at the same time help resolve our usersā€™ problems, or unmet needs. Whereas in design we take it as a tool or a leverage (Visual consistency, typeface and proper use of colour for interaction elements) to elevate the product, from a macro to micro level, of course in the context of design there can be more.

May I suggest you to start off slow by identifying the key problems from the brief. These can be issues experienced by customers, feature usability issues and etc so you can have a kick start point. From then conduct a simple research on how other competitors are doing, how they approach these issues.

Jason

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@dougcollins @jasonpang18 One of the project started like this. We are talking about an enterprise application that is used inside the company. Example : The tool lets you map data. There is an internal application that is used to map data that is gathered from end users ( I mean a ton of data which is personal to a businesses). For example lets consider geographical information: There is data of businesses connected to cities, connected to states, connected to countries, connected to worlds. With the help of this tool all of the data is mapped according to relevant information (This is just an example). There was no concept of UX applied to when it was designed way back in 2000. I had to take this tool up and work on coming up with a new prototype.

A few things I failed at:

  • I failed to understand how a persona information can be useful in this case.
  • The application itself was so complex that it is used by highly technical data engineers & analysts. It took me 15 days to even draw a user flow in my own mind.
  • I failed to find any examples projects for these anywhere online
  • I failed to come up with a final prototype because I failed in all of the above ( I did come up with one but the PM didnā€™t like it :expressionless: )

What could have I done to make it better? Any resources? I think Im not trained enough for all of this :dizzy_face: Should I just quit :confounded:

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Hi @HAWK I mean UX in an Enterprise, which is very different from UX in lets say a website with conversion as an end goal or an app with downloads as a goal. Some products which are enterprise level are SAP , CISCO, IBM where there are too many stake holders involved and not a very straight forward persona, sometimes you cant even interact with an end user.

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Just stumbled across this:

The state of enterprise UX design in 2017 https://tnw.to/2sGflsC

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Hi Saif,
First of all, smart move coming here. It can be hard to admit you need help, but itā€™s so much better than spinning your wheels and not getting anywhere!

I did UX for enterprise for several years. I know how hard it can be, and how different it is than other areas.

I wrote a couple of articles about my experience that I think might be helpful:

In short: focus on building relationships first and thinking in terms of ā€œsmall winsā€. Start with where the product is and make incremental improvements, rather than starting where it should be eventually. This means you may have to unlearn some of the stuff you learned in school! Most of all, be patient with yourself. When you look back youā€™ll be surprised how much impact you really did have.

Hope this helps,

  • Leon
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Hi Sarif,
I have worked in Enterprise my entire career and am trying to get into UX from IT. I found a Virtual Enterprise UX Summit that UX Pin does every year very enlightening. They post the videos online for all. You may find some of the info useful and there is even one from this year particularly about Personas from a team at IBM.

Good luck and donā€™t give up! Iā€™m sure itā€™s uncomfortable to be in the situation youā€™re in but you will never learn more than when you have no choice but to sink or swim. You landed the job so they must see potential in you. See it in yourself too!

-Crystal

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Thank you Leon. I cant explain what a relief it is to hear your story and encouraging words. I loved the articles! They resonate so much of what Iā€™m going through. I hope the day comes soon when Iā€™ll look back and say ā€œLeon, you were right!ā€ :blush:

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Thank you for the encouraging words and the resource Crystal. Iā€™d definitely give my best. :slight_smile:

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@imsaif Iā€™m here with you! I went through the exact same thing.

@dougcollins Please, write about EUX. If you didnā€™t yet.

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Were you a Business Analyst Prior?

What Software skills do you have?

I think you have just hit what I have been trying to tell people, Business analysts traditionally do UX and UI and they are part of the BRD. Business Requirements Document, which is what I think your PM is expecting. Enterprise applications are well beyond the scope of a web UX/UI guy, you have to know what happens to your wireframe, you need the requirements to spell that out, its a use case.

Ha, Ive been doing UX and UI for 15 years as a BA, but BAs get asked to do everything from PM to DBA etc. Id love to land a role just doing simple UX and UI, I imagine the use cases get fed back to the BA to write requirements.

I know how you feel.

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Thanks for reminding me! I have a couple of articles in the pipe that Iā€™m desperate to get out, but enterprise-level UX may be on the block after that.

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Its pretty simple, if you are designing an application, you need to know the entire SDLC whether its AGile or Waterfall, is irrelevant, you need to know, how will that button work, does it interface with another application or database, thats why requirements are so important, you cant build an app without requirements, they drive the design. How much IT technical knowledge do you have?

In an ideal world a BA would either do the UX and UI, or in this situation they would hand you the requirements for the build, and you would design around those requirements, it gets viewed by the sponsor or customer, there maybe some fine tuning which you would be involved with, and off it goes into the requirements document which ends up in the Systems Analysts hands for development. Now you can run Waterfall as fast as Agile, what I dont like about Agile is its too loose, which is done for speed, but inaccuracies cause fallacies.

True that Agile does not quite fit into the Eneterprise product development. We have something thatā€™s in between, I would say. But letā€™s not divide the UX and BA roles in this context. At my current company, I do both.

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And until recently so did every BA, this UX design role thing is pretty new. I think somebody probably in a large enterprise probably wanted to stick with studying human habit around software and wireframing UI and boom so the UX Designer role began. But really a Software BA does that in every software build. I find it very odd there are some UX Designers who have no concept of what an SDLC is or have any IT skills.

Agile is probably just too loose for old school CEO types of companies 80k employees and up etc.

I am the same, when I run my own projects, I combine RAD and WAterfall, so it looks like waterfall and has all the paper work behind it to keep management happy (so they know who to blame when things go wrong) but it also has the speed of Agile, without the stupid naming conventions, and hey I use to play Rugby lol