Heading out to Enterprise UX 2015? Or just wondering what exactly are the kinds of issues and challenges that “enterprise UX designers” face routinely? Below is our compilation of recent articles and essays that will give you a good start at understanding the enterprise UX landscape. Want to add more? Please post your suggestions as comments below.
Wired—January, 2015
Alan Cooper, the Father of Visual Basic, had the full attention of the entire class during his “Design Leadership” workshop. In the calm reassuring tone of a wise patriarch he said, “Design is not so much a design issue as a power struggle.”
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Silicon Valley Product Group—October, 2014
The role of the product organization is to consistently deliver significant new value to the business through continuous product innovation. At a startup, the product team either innovates and provides real value or the startup dies. In this article I want to talk about some of the deep reasons why innovation is stifled at so many established companies.
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Medium—February, 2015
How should a company go about scaling design thinking ? So you’re trying to implement design thinking inside your organisation, you’ve run a bunch of workshops and are wondering what to do next ?
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CMS Wire—October, 2014
A leading analyst recently said to me, “If enterprises cared about the user experience, SAP and Oracle might not still be in business.” Not to pick on those vendors — they produce technologies that drive value in the enterprise — but it’s no secret that the enterprise has lagged far behind the consumer world in terms of the user experience (UX).
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Medium—May, 2014
I’m a designer on an internal tools team, where I’m currently trying to unify the look and feel of a large set of different internal applications, developed by entirely different teams
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Simon & Schuster—Febuary, 2014
Great strategic conversations generate breakthrough insights by combining the best ideas of people with different backgrounds and perspectives. In this book, two experts “crack the code” on what it takes to design creative, collaborative problem-solving sessions that soar rather than sink.
(more on book)
Medium—January, 2015
It’s not “sexy” but who says it can’t be? Complexity and ambiguity can offer valuable moments for inspiring beautiful novelty in enterprise UX.
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New Riders—September, 2013
Just as we took our cues from MBAs and the military in casting the ideal CEO of the 20th century, we can look to design – in its broadest form – to model our future leader, the DEO. These leaders possess characteristics, behaviors and mindsets that allow them to excel in unpredictable, fast-moving and value-charged conditions. They are catalysts for transformation and agents of change. A hybrid of strategic business executive and creative problem-solver, the DEO is willing to take on anything as an object of design and looks at ALL problems as design challenges.
(more on book)
Business Standard—October, 2014
Greater product variety and shorter product life-cycles have put the onus on design, which goes a long way in determining what we buy and what we are prepared to pay for them.
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UX Magazine—January, 2015
As we continue doing business in the midst of the digital economy, mobile apps are becoming critical tools for companies seeking to mobilize and optimize key business processes.
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Harvard Business Review—January, 2015
Producing great products isn’t just about creativity and execution. It’s also about organizational alignment. Let me tell you a quick story…
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Harvard Business Review—February, 2015
There is a big, important change happening in digital product design. For a long time, there has been a clear split between business software (often called Enterprise or B2B), and consumer software (B2C, or simply “products”). That split is increasingly irrelevant.
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A List Apart—November, 2014
Imagine this scenario. You’re hired to design a product that has a guaranteed audience of 50,000 users, right out of the gate. Your clients have a dedicated support staff with a completely predictable technology stack. Best of all, your work directly improves the quality of your users’ lives.
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Forbes—June, 2014
Today, if your enterprise app isn’t beautiful, simple, elegant, and easy-to-use from day one, your company has little hope of becoming a billion-dollar business. Design is everything.
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asana: Workstyle—February, 2015
…as someone who’s designed applications for enterprise companies, as well as small business and consumer products, I’ve come to believe that the distinction between designing for consumer and enterprise applications has rapidly narrowed over the last several years, and today the distinction barely exists at all.
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LinkedIn—February, 2015
A set of terms that I had thought I understood from the get-go — “enterprise” customer and “consumer” customer — have been a constantly moving target in my mind.
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Medium—May, 2014
Few of our community focus on the underbelly of systems. The arenas of infrastructure and enterprise don’t seem to excite the average designer despite it’s tremendous impact in the world. We do however complain ad nauseum.
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UX Booth—February, 2013
If you’ve attended some of the major user experience design conferences over the past few years, you may have noticed a pattern: many presentations are geared toward (and given by) agency designers or freelancers. The same can be said of the design articles written: most concern themselves with newly built sites, site-wide redesigns or storefronts rather than the maintenance of large, established websites.
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UX Magazine—July, 2014
Eight years ago, while working at SAP, I overheard someone say our products needed to be “sexier.” I remember cringing.
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Medium—April, 2015
…new consumerized yet enterprise-focused entrants are changing expectations of what is possible in B2B through simpler architecture, cheaper development options for getting started, and growth strategies built around end-users and viral growth.
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Accel blog—April, 2014
Enterprise software has some a long way even in just the past five years from a usability perspective and this is because great product and design teams are thinking about the end user with more empathy.
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UX Magazine—March, 2015
Big data is extremely seductive to decision-makers because it adds to their perception of self as an “objective” and “data driven” leader. In actual fact, people exhibit a tremendous amount of confirmation bias, only seeing or emphasizing data that supports their existing beliefs, and this may happen completely subconsciously.
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Gartner Blog Network—January, 2014
Let’s face it. Enterprise software is the land that UX design forgot. Whether it’s an internal enterprise application development team, or the R&D department of an enterprise software vendor, the practices commonly found in UX design agencies the world over are poorly understood and rarely implemented.
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Diginomica—June, 2014
The enterprise UX designer is still a bit of a unicorn. The ‘team skills’ approach works better, but for every company that’s figured it out, plenty more need guidance.
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Diginomica—January, 2015
Lean UX is a different way of approaching UX design. But can it address Enterprise UX dilemmas?
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Disambiguity—July, 2014
This is Joy’s notebook.At the airport earlier today I had to switch my ticket from one flight to another. Joy was the customer service person who helped me do this.
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UX Magazine—August, 2014
Three clicks instead of ten. Two steps instead of five. White space. Intuitive icons. Drag and drop. As consumer UX underwent a renaissance over the last decade, enterprise software stagnated with a design sensibility from the dial-up era.
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UX Magazine—April, 2015
You can’t successfully design a complex system; as far as I’ve seen, the best approach is to do a really good job designing simple systems that can be platforms where the right kind of complex behaviors can emerge.
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Product Talk—January, 2015
Every time I speak about hypothesis testing, I get a series of questions about how to run experiments from people working on enterprise products.
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