Takeaways from the Enterprise UX 2015 Conference
By: Arthur Che
Tags: Events, Enterprise, Conference

Let’s face it: enterprise software historically has not successfully integrated meaning, emotion, and identity into UX designs. As an industry, we have a lot of work to catch up to the best of our consumer counterparts. At Salesforce, we complement traditional user testing with rapid ethnography to increase our understanding of our users’ worlds. However, it’s easy to get caught up in the what when sharing our designs with stakeholders. As a response to these presentations, Mary and our research team have focused more on the emotional side of our users when preparing for trips, debriefing stakeholders, and sharing data with other team members.

Crafting design systems

Enterprise UX was a fantastic opportunity to see how other teams are tackling the challenges of creating and scaling design systems.

David Cronin, Executive Design Director at GE, discussed the evolution and craft behind GE’s Industrial Internet Design System, a comprehensive tool for aligning visual language, interactions patterns, and technology across numerous products, teams, and users. GE, maker of everything from aircraft engines to microwaves, has in many ways become a software company as complex as any in the world.

Likewise, Phil Gilbert, General Manager at IBM Design, described the massive design effort underway at IBM. They are building a team of 1,500 designers — including many college recruits — in studios across the globe, with an IBM Design Language to support them. This gorgeous resource is the shared vocabulary for a design organization at unprecedented scale.

Here at Salesforce, we have a growing Design Systems team that is busy crafting a design system not just for our own products and teams, but for the vibrant ecosystem of partners and customers that build on our platform. Through our Salesforce1 Style Guide, we’ve found that many external developers, administrators, and users are looking to our UX team for design guidance and direction. We’re working hard on tools like the style guide to support consistency and quality across our services.

Fostering cross-functional collaboration

Another common theme was the importance of cross-functional collaboration to success in enterprise software development. We heard this constantly from presenters at companies like Citrix, Paypal, GE, and IBM, as well as from fellow attendees on the floor and in the official conference Slack.

The so-called “Three-in-a-Box” model, describing the required partnership across Design, Product Management, and Engineering in particular, certainly reflects our experience here at Salesforce. We’ve found that bringing product teams into our process early on is extremely rewarding in the long run. We include product owners and engineers in brainstorming and sketching sessions. We invite them to watch (and ask questions) during user research. Early cross-functional involvement means that everyone, not just UX, has a hand in our designs.

@jarber shares stories of bringing design culture across functions at Citrix. Photo credit: Shannon Johnson

After the conference, we’re inspired to take this collaboration further. We want our designers and researchers to work closely with product managers to learn about the business side of our products. We should work even more with engineers to better understand Lightning and our overall development architecture. We’ll keep bringing PMs, developers, and quality engineers to our customer site visits. We’ll also continue to encourage our design team to gain Salesforce certification and get a true look at the experience of our administrators.

Designing for experimentation

How might enterprises embrace the fail fast, fail often mantra? Lean methodology needs an organization willing to adapt and learn. Bill Scott, VP of Business Engineering at Paypal, emphasized the value of designing for “throwaway-ability” and being open to constant change. In large organizations, it is easy to fall into the trap of building for delivery versus innovation.

To reinvent their checkout experience, Paypal formed lean UX/engineering teams to rapidly prototype and test new ideas. These teams stressed the importance of constant learning. Scott also presented Netflix as an example of a company that embraces experimentation by focusing on the customer and strategically carving a path to build-measure-learn, from the structure of their teams to their choice in programming languages. Netflix uses its UI as an experimentation layer. Scott ended his presentation with an open question: