Overview
It might not monitor your exercise regimen, teach you German, or showcase your selfies, but enterprise-scale software is critical to the happiness of millions of people and just aching for the tender loving care of UX practitioners.
So why aren’t more of the cool kids doin’ it? From Fortune 500 corporations to government departments, enterprise organizations have gained a bad rap with creative types. Stifling bureaucracies, soul-sucking working environments, the spectre of white collared shirts—you name it, the charges have been laid. But as problem solvers, we UX types love a good challenge, and the peculiarities of an enterprise organization can be fodder for creative triumph, if we have the patience. As trendy, VC-backed consumer products launch to great acclaim and retweet, enterprise practitioners work tirelessly in the background to solve UX problems that enable people to do their best work.
Over the past 5 years, my team and I have worked almost exclusively with enterprise organizations in a professional services capacity. With this as a backdrop, join me as we explore the landscape of enterprise UX, its users, its nuanced design challenges, and its business casual dress codes. We’ll survey the good, the bad, and the ugly, talk through tactics, and understand the potential impact of great experiences at scale.
Objective
To expose UX practitioners to the landscape and opportunities of enterprise UX & digital product development
Target Audience
Designers, developers, and product strategists new to enterprise UX; those who spend most of their time in marketing agencies or consumer-facing product and professional service companies
Five things audience members will learn
- What, exactly, enterprise UX and enterprise digital product development are all about and what design opportunities they present
- What constitutes “good” user experience in enterprise software (hint: Internet Explorer 6 is considered highly-usable), and how bad other users really have it (please, stop complaining about iTunes’ redesign—you don’t know how good you have it!)
- How, for better or (less ideally) for worse, enterprise UX practitioners can deeply impact the world
- How to navigate an enterprise UX project journey and encourage design thinking, experimentation, and iterative approaches to UX
- Which skills to develop if you’re considering a venture into the enterprise universe
