Enterprise UX: Meaning, Use, Examples
Enterprise UX is becoming an integral part of the business growth strategies adopted by both established and growing companies. More and more organizations realize the tight connection between good employee experience at work and better client service. As a result, they are motivated to invest in this area to ensure continuous growth and earn more customers.
Whether you are a business representative willing to make the work process more effective or an expert interested in innovative design solutions, this article will give you valuable insights into how to drive better enterprise user experience.
In this piece, we will explore enterprise UX design and discuss the benefits it brings to companies. We will also figure out how it differs from customer UX, what workflow is usually implemented to achieve good results in this field, and what trends shape its future.
What is enterprise UX?
Let’s start with the definition of enterprise-focused UX. Being a relatively new term in UX design, it is interpreted differently and depends on the context in which it is used. In its narrower sense, enterprise-focused UX refers to the experience an employee gets when using corporate software solutions, such as HR management tools, communication software, CRM systems, task management solutions, etc.
In the broader sense, enterprise-focused UX covers the technology tools, solutions, systems, programs, and products leveraged in the work environment. The purpose of enterprise UX is to improve employee experience at work, streamline their effort, and facilitate task completion with the help of technology.
Enterprise-focused UX is defined by how comfortable an employee is with using the tools and solutions at work and how much these solutions help them do their jobs. This term covers the following aspects:
- Research on the target audience
- The creation and integration of software tools and products
- The assessment and testing of software usability and intuitiveness
- The development and implementation of effective information architecture (IA) design
As this comprehensive list demonstrates, a well-designed user interface is not enough for a tool to ensure good UX. To achieve this goal, organizations should study their end users and the peculiarities of their jobs, use the insights they gain to select or build a solution that satisfies user needs, and even provide the necessary training and guidelines to make sure the employees get the most out of the technology.
80% of people involved in creative jobs report the adverse effects of poor design on their productivity. This means that the more convenient work conditions are provided to an employee, the more motivation and capacity they will have for ensuring a good experience for your clients.
More and more companies mind the aspect of UX when improving the work environment for their employees. They put effort into studying and enhancing the experience an employee gets when interacting with different software tools and technology. Let’s review the benefits it gives them.
Benefits of improving the enterprise UX
The use of software becomes an indispensable part of the employee’s daily routine, which makes UX an important aspect in ensuring employee comfort at work. Good user experience gives companies numerous advantages and can result in the following:
What you can get from improving the enterprise UX.
Increase efficiency
Process automation, ensured with the help of technology, saves a lot of employee time. Instead of performing mundane tasks manually, an employee can automate them with software, devoting time to more goal-critical tasks. For a business, this means that an employee will have more time for idea generation, creativity, brainstorming, etc.
Automation will help a company reach its goals efficiently and dedicate employee time to transformational activities. The more convenient and intuitive software they use, the more time they will have to work on such activities.
Cut costs
Often, a business pays for a monthly subscription for a dozen tools to use the features that can be found in one tool. It would be more efficient for them to subscribe to an all-in-one tool instead of spending a big sum of money on separate solutions.
So, instead of paying for plenty of inconvenient and useless tools, an organization can conduct research on their target users and find an effective piece of software that fully satisfies user needs.
The same can be said about building corporate software from scratch. In this case, enterprise UX designers conduct research and project planning to create a need-tailored product with the right functionality and features employees will love.
If you are looking for expert help in this task, consider hiring a UX design agency in London. Being one of the most progressive and tech-driven cities in the world, London offers a wide talent pool of UX designers experienced in UX research and the creation of workable enterprise UX solutions.
Improve client experience
Software tools and solutions are the main bridge connecting your clients with your employees. It’s the technology that determines how quickly your employees get in touch with your clients, respond to their concerts, and reply to their queries. By providing your team with an effective toolset, you give them 360-degree visibility of the current business situation and client sentiment.
Thus, if you invest in employee experience, you feed two birds with one scone. Not only do you improve the work conditions for your team, but you also make sure that your clients get a high-quality and tech-driven service.
Enhance the reputation
Successful enterprise UX projects can positively impact your brand reputation. By improving employee experience, you demonstrate that you hear your team’s needs and concerns.
Enterprise-focused UX is a part of the broad experience employees get at work. And while improving enterprise-focused UX, you also improve your company’s image in the employee’s eyes.
Streamline cooperation
Enterprise UX is a doubly important notion if your company implements different working modes, like remote work and work at the office. Good experience when using software can streamline employee cooperation and teamwork.
By conducting research on the needs of your employees, you will get data on the technology features and functions that are a must at your organization. This, in turn, will help you select or build the right solution for your team and their effective cooperation.
Drive sales
Software solutions help your employees learn more about the clients. At work, your team uses various software tools and systems, like customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, SEO tools, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and others.
Although all these systems are targeted at internal use, they can help your employees extract a lot of information on your business from external sources. By choosing effective solutions, you also make employee work more insightful, which has the potential to drive sales and increase productivity.
Typical workflow for enterprise UX design
Enterprise design can be viewed from different perspectives depending on the peculiarities of work in an organization. An effective design should take into account the work of an employee as an individual, a team consisting of employees, and a department consisting of teams.
The workflow for crafting functional designs should center around the end users. In our case, the target audience is an employee. Thus, the solutions adopted by your company should be designed in accordance with employee needs and preferences.
Below, you can see the typical workflow implemented by UX design companies to generate insights into enterprise user needs. These insights are then used to plan out the whole design process and drive prolific results from such an investment.
1. Conduct research
Steps in enterprise user research.
The stage of research is pretty universal and should lay the foundation for any design process. By studying your audience, you will clearly understand what product they need and if they need it at all. When working on enterprise UI/UX design, you get a big advantage — you can reach your audience effortlessly without the need to refer to external sources of data.
As said above, the end users of enterprise-focused UX design are employees. You should observe your employees at work and collect data on what their daily needs and challenges are, what tools they use, what tasks they complete daily, and what features are a must in their work.
The data collected during this stage will show you the inner side of your team’s work and help you understand the user flow your employees go through. It’s also a great opportunity to refer to your corporate documentation and check if all the processes and operations work as prescribed.
2. Talk to end users
The return of investment in US research is $100 for every $1 invested.
The report by Forrester shows that $1 dollar invested in UX can bring $100 in return. But to achieve such a big ROI, you should fully immerse into the life of your target audience and learn how they interact with the software not only by observing it but also by asking them questions.
Apart from the observation and analysis, you should engage in the conversation with your employees. Ask your team how they evaluate the current toolset and work setup, figure out if they lack some features or tools, what solutions to their pain points are, and more.
By putting yourself into the employee’s shoes, you will better understand their vision of the work duties and the most effective solutions to their challenges. Make this stage unbiased by engaging with different stakeholders and evaluating the work process both at the macro and micro levels of management.
3. Design and implement UX strategy
Guide to enterprise UX strategy.
Your strategy for improving enterprise UX will depend on the software type your company uses. Your action plan will be different in the cases when you choose between the off-the-shelf UX design tools, customize the current UX design processes, or create new designs from scratch.
You should make a list of the solutions your team leverages or is supposed to and check it against the fundamental UX design principles. Map the functionality of your software infrastructure and make sure that your perfect user flow can be fully implemented in the given context. By doing so, you will understand if these solutions are the perfect match for user pains and get insights into possible improvements for the enterprise-focused UX.
4. Provide training and support
Benefits of providing training and support for employees.
Any changes introduced in a company are stressful for employees. Try to make the enhancements to enterprise user experience design smooth and employee-friendly. How to minimize the negative feelings associated with the introduction of something new? The answer is to provide training and support to your team.
If you replace, add, or remove software tools, you should prepare guidance for your employees on how to use the new UX solutions. During training sessions, instruct them on the functionality essential for their work and make sure they take the most out of using the software.
In the process of implementation, it’s also important to ensure continuous support. It will cover the cases when your team faces an issue and does not know how to fix it. Demonstrate your responsibility for the enhancements and your readiness to help your team get used to new features or a new user interface.
5. Collect feedback and improve the experience
Five approaches to collect employee feedback.
This stage of the enterprise UX workflow is often skipped by organizations hoping for positive changes. But to finalize the whole job, you should give it some time and then collect employee feedback on how their experience has changed. The perfect scenario is that the feedback will be positive, and you will schedule the next enterprise-focused UX improvements in the future.
However, it may also happen that your employees will report some issues or challenges requiring your attention. In that case, do not leave the problems aside. Try to improve your solutions or look for alternatives. And do not give up on your effort. Typically, companies need several iterations to achieve the optimal UX level at the current stage of their growth.
Top 5 trends that shape the enterprise user experience
Key factors influencing the user experience in enterprise environments.
Novel technologies and features will help you offer a better UX in your company. Together, they shape growing enterprise-focused UX trends that drive personalization, increase automation, and make the whole journey more pleasant for a user. Here are the top 5 trends worth your attention:
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Passwordless logins. At work, people use a variety of tools. On the one hand, setting one password for all of them is insecure. On the other hand, setting different passwords and using dozens of them daily to log into the apps can be anxious. To give your employees relief, integrate the function of passwordless logins.
Passwordless login is using the alternative login method, which can be signing in with a Google or social media account, biometric authentication, PINs, etc. This feature will save employee’s time and make the start of their work more comfortable.
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AI integration. Integrating AI technologies into enterprise applications can transform your employee’s approach to work. With the help of smart technology, you can automate a lot of processes and tasks, streamline the workflow, and get access to insightful user analytics that will help you better understand if you make the right enterprise-focused UX decisions.
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Animated illustrations. Enterprise-focused UX should not lag behind customer-focused UX in terms of innovations and usability. As animated illustrations appear frequently in consumer apps, you can also add this feature to your enterprise-focused UX. Animated illustrations make the interaction with an app more smooth and engaging. They instantly grab user attention and help them maintain focus on stories, products, or services that are important for their work. Animated illustrations also positively influence the solution’s aesthetics, making the employee experience more captivating and pleasant.
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AR/VR implementation. People tend to think that AR and VR are technologies implemented only for entertaining purposes. However, in the context of enterprise-focused UX, they also have the power to drive immersive user experience and help employees effectively complete their tasks. Integrating these technologies into employee experience can make the work process more engaging and convenient, bringing positive work outcomes for your team.
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3D graphics. 3D graphics has been an emerging UX trend in recent years. It helps enhance virtual tours, simulations, 360-degree presentations, etc. With this technology, you can provide your employees with a comprehensive view of the product, enabling them to find room for product improvement and better understand how the product is seen by the end users.
London design agencies are known for their expertise in creating engaging 3D motion designs and animations. If you are interested in adding 3D visuals to your enterprise UX solutions, our recent article will help you choose the best London-based UX design partner from the top candidates.
Enterprise UX vs. customer UX: major differences
When people tell you about UX in software design, they usually mean customer-centric design targeted at the external audience. However, while working on employee experience, we shouldn’t forget about who stays behind the scenes.
Enterprise-focused UX focuses primarily on the experience your team gets when using software. It does not strive to exceed expectations like it is with customer UX. Enterprise-focused UX aims to satisfy the work-related needs of an employee. It differs from customer UX in many aspects. Let’s discuss the key aspects in more detail.
Scalability
Consumer UX, which is implemented in consumer apps, aims to attract a wide audience. With a well-designed product, a business gets the chance to scale and grow the number of clients.
The scalability aspect is often hard to predict when it comes to consumer products. Usually, designers conduct multiple testing sessions to find new scalability opportunities and figure out what appeals to their clients the most.
In contrast to this, UX design that centers on enterprises does not strive for maximum scalability. Such software is usually designed for a limited number of people and a limited number of tasks. Scalability in this context is defined by the user’s opportunity to start and manage new projects with the help of a tool.
So, enterprise design is not aimed at attracting as many users as possible. It aims to satisfy the needs of a particular employee group and streamline their work. This makes enterprise-focused UX design a more efficient and less time-consuming process compared to customer-centric design.
Decision-makers
The decision-makers involved in designing consumer UX are external clients. They are not interested in using a particular piece of software for the sake of using it. Instead, customers choose between a variety of tools and opt for the one that fully meets their requirements. They are decision-makers who decide on the software to use, customizations and plans they need, and features they prioritize.
Enterprise-focused UX is different. End users working with tools and software solutions are not the decision-makers. Very rarely, they are provided with the chance to choose the software on their own. Usually, these are the executives that compose the IT infrastructure used in the company.
Surely, good enterprise-focused UX takes into account the needs of the end users. However, end users do not make the final decision on the toolset as they do not consider the rest of the aspects that are no less important when choosing. For instance, the budget the company devotes to software purchases, their maintenance capacities, the privacy policies, etc.
Purpose
The main purpose of client-centric UX design is to attract user attention and make them return to the app or website again and again. Each solution targeted at clients should have the competitive power that will differentiate them from competitors and help attract a broad audience. What’s more, such solutions should continually improve to retain clients.
In contrast to this, the purpose of enterprise UX design is to help employees complete their tasks in an easy and quick way. They will inevitably return to the software because using it is part of their work duties. Thus, there is no need for the tools to keep users in tension or stir up their interest. The goals set for enterprise-focused UX are plain — each solution should serve its purpose.
Focus
Consumer apps are usually commercial products created by a company with the aim of gaining a profit. Thus, customer UX cannot focus only on the user experience when interacting with a solution. Instead, it should consider the experience the user gets before, during, and after the interaction.
In other words, it focuses on the entire user journey and all the stages they take when interacting with a product. From the discovery and consideration stages to the use and retention stage, consumer-centered UX should focus on the overall impression a user gets from a product.
By exceeding the user expectations during each of these stages, a company gets the opportunity to earn regular customers. This is why the focus of consumer-centered UX is more complex, compared to enterprise UX.
As for the latter, its focus lies only on the moment of interaction. Enterprise-focused UX serves a particular purpose and usually does not go beyond it. After interaction with enterprise software, an employee does not make a decision if they like it or not. They treat it as a part of their daily routine and the means for completing their tasks. Therefore, the purpose of enterprise-focused UX is more straight and not that global.
The ROI of investing in employee experience
Improving enterprise solutions is a must if you want to implement digital transformation in your company. Technology has become an integral part of people’s everyday experience almost in every sphere, and your organization should keep pace with the user-centric trends that determine how people interact with software.
Developing a solid enterprise-focused UX strategy gives numerous benefits. Apart from making your team’s work easier and more comfortable, it also lays the foundation for better business results and higher quality of services. Start this journey as soon as possible if you want to enhance collaboration, increase efficiency, and revolutionize the way people do their jobs!