Oh please, enterprise UX is not (just)about Internal softwares
As enterprise software industry modernises and becomes user centric, there lies an open canvas for UX practitioners to shape that future
You might be surprised as how many websites and blogs describe enterprise UX as UX design for internal softwares of a company. Most of them refer to softwares that helps in payroll, customer relationship management (CRM) and other internal business processes of a large organisation. Inevitably it comes to SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft Office and their competitors in this space.
While that definition is not entirely false, it is severely limiting the scope of enterprise software in this day and age.
In the prophetic words of Marc Andreessen from Andreessen and Horowitz,
'Software is eating the world'
Almost every inconceivable industry or physical business is being migrated to software & internet if not being transformed. He wrote this in 2011. And in the last decade this has only increased even further. And today we have enterprise grade software that runs on a 50$ android phone app. No longer enterprise softwares are about basic business processes. While Microsoft office and Salesforce continue to exist, there are hundreds of new age enterprise products such as Canva, Jira, Slack, Shopify, Figma, Postman to name a few, each boasting millions of enterprise users. All of these software look and operate fundamentally different from the legacy SAP softwares that we have known as enterprise softwares in the past.
Here is a super reduced version of modern day enterprise software products. Some of them cater to both individuals and enterprises but the large business model is around enterprise use cases. Remember this barely covers 10% of the enterprise software universe.
So what does all this mean to Enterprise UX design? Almost everything.
The fundamental shift is from simple productivity to deeper user delight.
By user delight. I am not referring to a cute little animation for the loading screen or a mesmerising illustration for a cloud SaaS software. I am referring to empowering users to such an extent that the software is a delight to get things done better than he/she ever imagined.
It refers to the software being humane. Software that does not make you feel stupid. Software that does not play 'knock knock guess who' in its user flows. In a nutshell, a software that is mature enough to focus on the user and let everything fade in the background.
How does it affect me as a UX practitioner?
This natural maturity in the evolution of software puts UXers on the most advantageous position to influence the entire product and roadmap in any organisation. Knowingly or unknowingly the core of all UX processes are built on understanding users and their needs, which is the most difficult and ephemeral part in today's agile software development. The existing arsenal of User research can be far more effective in an enterprise context when you clearly know who are the real users of your product . UX benchmarking may not only provide the much needed ROI calculation, it could potentially identify an underserved niche for the software to expand. The ability of a designer to give the first shape and form for a product could really help a product manager in shaping the product vision so early in the product cycle.
All this and more are yet to be fully explored in enterprise space and the space is only growing further. In this blog, we will cover practical, no-jargon analysis of UX and its inevitable role in enterprise UX. Let me know your thoughts on what you think about enterprise UX and what topics within enterprise UX would you like me to write more about.
Cheers, have a good day.