Your employees deserve a better user experience, also for your own sake. Touching enterprise UX.
By: Arshdeep Singh
Tags: Employee Engagement, Employee Experience, Enterprise Ux, User Experience, Enterprise Software

I remember asking a former boss about whether a tool was an “Enterprise class” application, and her response was “Enterprise class just means ugly and hard to use.” While I laughed at her response, the hard truth is at the time, she was right. — Stuart Silverstein

The problem of Enterprise User Experience

“Your employees are your greatest assets” is a line that has been repeated in one form or another so many times in books, social media, blogs, conferences, and so on. It is almost impossible to even consider this as a false statement because we know in our guts it is the truth.

However this mantra is still not embraced fully by the companies, there are areas where it is completely, I mean completely ignored but before we talk about the missed opportunities let’s just touch on what is being done right, briefly.

For start, companies often organize employee development programs, make quality of life alterations, and improves HR policies. So what is missing? In the age of screens, It is by the design of today’s ecosystem that employees spend most of their working hours on screens, to tweak software settings, to create software on a software, to upload, enter and crunch data. It is the inefficiency of these systems that companies have failed to address, either due to lack of expertise or culture.

From CEOs to entry-level employees, people rely on digital tools at work — tools that are mostly inadequate or even terrible in terms of user experience (UX). Some of these business users feel frustrated, while others are so accustomed to bad UX that they rarely notice. But whether or not users realize it, these enterprise UX problems cause their companies to waste time, undermine vital transformations, underserve customers, and risk dangerous mistakes. — Andrew Hogan

Employees of twenty-first-century work on systems that are supposed to increase productivity, reduce time or automate repeated tasks, yet, they are forced to work on inefficient systems, which not only act against their productivity but also adversely affect employee quality of life and the loss to companies from inefficient systems is a looooooot and dangerously enough, it's hidden.

Businesses that have played the long game in regards to investing in superior UX have been treated favorably. The most design-centric enterprises on the S&P 500 outperformed their counterparts by 228 percent over the course of a 10 year period. — uptopcorp.com

This I believe is one of the biggest missed opportunities of a modern business, it is not all bad, if not worst. A well-thought-out user experience for enterprise system will increase employee engagement, productivity, reduce training time & resources used by the company.

Benefits of a Better Enterprise UX

Engaged Employees

According to a survey by Gallup survey, only 13% of the employees find themselves engaged at work due to inefficient systems or miserable work experiences. Enhancing user experience for intranets, portals, and internal applications can simplify task completion and streamline communications to the direct benefit of increased productivity, unified company culture, and increased employee engagement.

Now, the user experience of company systems can not alone be responsible for employee disengagement but it is one the major influencers. As I said earlier employees of the 21st century spend most of their time on screens and systems which constitute a major part of their working experience.

Reduced Time.

When I was at Avaya, I was a part of the core enterprise UX team, our goal was to enhance the user experience of the enterprise system with the greater objective to reduce the training time of internal and client systems. This was one of the best use of user experience I have seen in a large corporation.

Every time a company makes a sale of its system, overheads began to pile up from unexpected (expected if the company considers design thinking) sources

Training your employees or clients always takes more than it meets the eye, for example, back and forth communication eats a significant amount of time and money over a prolonged time. Communication gaps can arise, which requires further clarification, sometime these gaps can be very costly to either side.

A good enterprise user experience will allow minimal training time, is accompanied by a dedicated help section or component-wise information built into the UI. It will reduce the dependency of the user to seek help outside the software, thus making everyone efficient in the process.

Besides training time, an efficiently designed system will allow faster task completion (as mentioned above), optimize the number of steps involved in task completion, and offers quality of life improvements.

Reduce Errors

Enterprise systems are complex because they are required to manage complex and very specific information, minor human error can have disproportional effects. Don Norman, the guru of user experience in his book “Design of everyday things” points out clearly most errors associated with the modern system are due to poor system design and very few can be attributed to human error.

Moreover, we often blame the human for mistakes but we do not hold accountable the teams and stakeholders that have built these systems. Humans are prone to errors by design therefore it is the duty of the stakeholder and companies to create a system that minimizes errors. A good system will always first avoid error states and then provide checks to conclude a task.

Let’s Conclude

There are further implications of a good enterprise UX, however, any company that takes into account the basics of design thinking will not only help itself but also have engaged employees who are not only productive but also happier.

The amount of unnecessary internal communications can be drastically reduced. Let’s not forget about preventing errors that could amount to huge losses and grief to the people involved.

This article is written for Medium and Concept Collective a Linkedin group. At Concept Collective our aim is to encourage dialogue and creativity in the use of technology, for the sole purpose of preservation and sustainability of humanity for it to achieve whatever it is destined for. Please do like & share the post, given that you actually liked it. You can join Concept Collective on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin & Instagram.