Did I hear UX in enterprise ! Yippie

Great piece of news to kick the new year off :
Fresh from Ajaxworld News Desk: 2008 Prediction: "The User Experience (UX) Meme Will Reach the Enterprise" — In SYS-CON's annual round-up of technology predictions, Brad Abrams, a Group Program Manager at Microsoft, highlighted the likelihood of what he called 'the UX meme of the consumer facing world [leaking] into the enterprise' and noted: 'The days of the battleship gray, forms of data application as the king of the enterprise are numbered because of an imperative towards richer visualization of complex and interconnected data. While there will always be a need for the traditional sort of application, by the end of 2008, it is no longer the only element of the corporate landscape.'

But then, we saw it coming for a long time. Thanks Brad.

I would like to take this argument a little further to another natural extension , yet long overdue rethink on UX in the enterprise context. Bear with me. This might test your patience and mental image of the UX meme.

Think enterprise UX and a strong association with enterprise software automatically emerges. Enterprise software with battleship gray and passport registration forms variety. A mother ship software orchestrating faceless departmental warriors and well oiled processes to get things done the way your TQM charged COO prescribed it. Or the one your CTO from DOS/mainframe generation felt 'fits the bill'. And in case your CXO comes from the Led Zep fan base ( count yourself lucky), you might get a blog or two, pastel grey shadows and maybe even an internal portal for free exchange of ideas and movie tickets. Life is good. So, in this year, expect major UX related investment to repaint your mothership or expect to see your cool dude CXO to be featured as Time magazine’s person of the year for revolutionary thinking.

So what's that got to do with UX as we know it ? Couple of key things are horribly wrong in the above imagery :

1. The very definition of UX in enterprise context - that's a semi metaphysical point.
2. The implication of UX in enterprise context - the hard hitting, almost physical point.

#1 : Forgive me this digression but enterprises ( and all associated paraphernalia like process, people, promotions) exist for delivering value to clients/customers. So, by definition, UX in this context too might just anchor around them. Fixing enterprise software UX is a worthy pursuit( about time too) but it goes far beyond that. I would like to believe that the U in UX for enterprise refers to the customers and that's what the UX design should focus on. So, you accept the point and you build your flagship product with kickass UX designed in. Good, you are already in a progressive minority. But what if your product is essentially a service ? Now, you are one amongst 90% of all listed business. Bad place to get stumped. Ergo : Think hard and think differently. Then the problem statement for UX in your enterprise reads [How do I design for UX in my client facing services ?]. It's a fundamental shift in UXthink in the enterprise context. A. It has got very little to do with products .B. It has got a lot to do with people who do not use your enterprise IT. Fix the internal ERP and CRM UX and you have essentially designed for the wrong set of users! Enterprise SOA is good, single sign on is smart, knowledge wikis are cool but they are not an end in themselves. They exist to deliver something else to someone outside your org boundary.

#2 : If you did accept my point above, we have agreed to look at designing a customer experience around your service. Now, that's something that has very fluid boundaries. You might look at it as a buy-sell experience and be done. Or you might look at it as creating a lasting partnership. Not that one is better than the other though lot of gurus have extreme opinions about it. That's beside the point. What matters is your customer's experience during each and every contact. What one might call moment's of truth. The mad minute when all he has read and heard about you is forgotten and all that matters is the specific experience during that call/meeting/handshake. Moment's of truth can be physical, remote or anywhere in the space time continuum [linkedin profile, blog posts, website popups, office design, the lady in your reception, even your office fire escape ! Yeah, we had one customer checking that out too !]. And he/she is absolutely right in forming opinions based on each of these. It is his idea of forming tangible ideas about the intangibles. And designing such experience levers ought to be the key UX design goal for the enterprise.

That’s a pretty hard nut to crack. For starters it is an open ended problem. And it is an all pervasive challenge. Think of it this way. Your top 10 customers meet your CEO once a month/quarter depending on how big you are. So, that’s 1 moment of truth delivered flawlessly by an experienced champion. But the same client talks to your helpdesk thrice every day, meets your project lead once a day, accesses your invoice systems once a month, reads the change request form once a fortnight and it may not even be the same guy who is doing all this. Hence the number of ‘moments of truth’ are order of magnitude higher. Is the enterprise UX designed to make life easy for him ? How do you fix them one experience at a time for the organization you belong to ? Can we define workflows, persona, experience skins or do rapid protos ? Whose responsibility is it anyway ?

If you belong to the overwhelming majority who delivers services for a living , how do you think beyond products and apply the concepts to intangibles ? And oh, do fix that internal ERP UX while you are at it.