Presented for the Albany UX Meetup on Oct 4, 2016 at GE Global Research Center in Niskayuna, NY. EUX is different from consumer focused UX. My observations on practicing EUX and hiring EUX professionals.

1. A brief introduction to
Enterprise
(and Industrial)
UXLarry Burks

2. Continue the discussion
https://github.com/netplusdesign/enterprise-ux/issues

3. http://alistapart.com/article/ux-for-the-enterprise

4. Where I’m
coming from

6. Financial

7. RISK
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Government

8. Industrial

9. Industrial

10. What’s different?

11. Business
Technology
Users
UX
Consumer

12. Users
Technology
Business
Customers
Enterprise

13. Users
Technology
Business
Customers
Industrial
Engineers

14. Users
Technology
Business
Engineers
Consumer IoT

15. Customers and Users
• Customers/buyers are generally not the ones that use the product, but
they are the decision maker
• Users don’t have the budget or the decision, but they influencers
• Other auxiliary users, customer support, resellers, managers,
administrators… have different goals
• Smaller, more focused audiences defined by what they do, not by
marketing category
• Sometimes very accessible (and opinionated)

16. User adoption
• Adoption is often required, not optional
• Even when required, people will find work-arounds
• When workarounds are removed, service tickets increase
• The end result is business does not see the benefits
• These are some of the biggest problems & opportunities in
enterprise software

17. Time scale
• Social media
• Reading or composing email
• Design or presentation tools
• Enterprise users can spend their entire work day using a single
product. Your product. Under repetitive, stressful conditions.
8 or 12 hours

18. Content vs Function
• What is the goal of Facebook? Or Twitter, NYTimes, Amazon?
• What is the goal of Excel? Or AutoCad, InDesign? Concur?
• Content is input, functionality is the focus
• Goal is to make it easy to get content in and manipulate it for an
outcome

19. Design is not enough
• A business person that gets design
is rare. More rare is the designer
that gets the business.
• Enterprise apps are built using a
much wider variety of hardware and
software. Just knowing HTML is not
enough.
• This learning process takes years a
lifetime

20. Learn the business
Questions to ask yourself
• Why is the company doing this project? Regulatory? Risk
mitigation? Process automation or internal cost
reduction?
• How does the business intend to make money from this
project?
• Is there a sequence of steps or process to complete a
transaction, or case or commission a piece of
equipment?
• Is the process defined purely by business necessity?
How can user needs influence the process?
Why is it important?
• Helps you ask better
questions when doing
user research
• Helps build trust with
users and
stakeholders
• Helps to explain
design decisions in
terms the business
understands

21. Learn the technology
• Learn how software is made
• Learn the lingo (git, commit, push, pull, pull request, unit
tests…)
• The more complex the technical solution, the more
difficult it will be to influence the experience
• Developers in large organizations know even less about
working with designers
• There is unlikely to be any specialized front-end
developers
• The UI may not be HTML at all
Why is it important?
• Understand the
consequences of
design choices
• Helps build trust with
development team
• Helps to explain
design decisions in
terms developers
understand

22. Requirements
• Funding and scoping a project starts with requirements
• Who gets to write the requirements? (Business Analysts)
• What do the requirements look like?
• How easy are they to understand?
• Visualizing requirements

23. x 1,200x 1,000,000

24. Project scale
• Enterprise apps can sometimes have 100s of screens or functions and maybe only
a few hundred or few thousand users
• Scale of development can influence amount of documentation and the number of
developers, teams, locations, and the price tag
• Scale can complicate and slow decision making
• Time is money. If you have 200,000 users performing a task 20 x a day that takes 2
minutes instead of 1. That’s 66,666 hours of lost productivity in 1 day. Multiply by
days, weeks, hourly rate… $$$
• Not all screens can be ‘designed’, they can be the result of combining many
different modules

25. https://medium.com/ge-design/ges-predix-design-system-8236d47b0891#.wblv8ipdj
GE’s Predix Design System

26. Design
• Designing a design system
• Less wireframing, more composing from kit of parts
• Sometimes low-fidelity is not your friend
• Unique design patterns
• Use real data!

27. Usability testing
• No Lorum Ipsum!
• New paradigms and new processes are hard to test
• Customers time may be very valuable
• Customers are the gate keepers to end users
• Users may give feedback they think their manager wants to hear
• Actual users invested in the outcome of a product can give invaluable
feedback

28. Usability testing
for Industrial
• App is too complex to do quick tests
• Testing often requires realtime data and process simulation
• Measuring trust (in automation)

29. Distributed Teams
• Global - Your projects may include many remote offices.
You may not have any co-located team members.
• Face time is an essential component to building trust.
Get on a plane often ;-)
• Languages / timezones
• Working with remote teams often says how much
documentation you will need to produce
• Every time you start a new project, you have to teach
the team what you do and why it is valuable
Make yourself usable.

30. Business or Technology
• Working for the business means
• you are closer to where the decisions are made
• easier access to customers and users
• may be easier to influence the direction of the product or process
• Working for technology means
• more likely to have the design executed as you intended
• easier to influence the process by which the product is built
• harder to get access to users for research and testing
• End of day, you have to make it work either way, and with
re-orgs you may find yourself switching sides
If hired by the business it’s
likely they are not getting
what they want from tech.

31. EUX as a career

32. Skill Assessment
Interaction Design
Information Architecture
Visual Design
Visualization
User Research
Usability Testing
Prototyping
Recent graduate Sought after
conference speaker
Engage Stakeholders
Earn trust
Prioritize efforts
Understand business quickly
Balance biz/buyer/user/tech needs
Recent graduate Sought after
conference speaker
EnterpriseUX
BaseUX

33. Skills and Experience
• Complex (more than a shopping cart) business processes
• Functional, workflow or transactional experience
• Analysis - decision support
• T-shaped (deep in at least one business domain)
• Can articulate a design in terms that business and
technology people can understand
• Ability to play well with others and lead undercover
• Looking for the right fit
Get comfortable saying,
“I don’t know.”
[But this is how we
might find out.]

34. How to build EUX skills?
• Research
• Personal projects
• Find some data and try to visualize it, quantified-self data
• Find a manual process you do today and design a UI for it
• Find a horrible device UI and design a mobile app for it (ex. programmable
thermostat or switch)
• Build a small app and host it in Github
• Conferences - Tech, IoT, Maker, Enterprise UX

36. How to find EUX work?
• Find a way to make it easy to switch jobs
• Don’t be afraid of taking a job in a new domain for less money.
Remember scarcity of resources in economic theory.
• How you talk about your portfolio is more important than your
actual portfolio
• Talk to a recruiter, hopefully with some design or UX expertise
• Go to conferences

37. Questions to ask
• What do your products do?
• Who are the users? Who are the buyers?
• Is this a position on the business side or tech side?
• Are you looking for someone with domain experience, or willing
to train?
• What does the team look like? What is the experience and
background of the manager?
• Who defines the requirements? Is there an opportunity to work at
this stage of projects?
• How long have you been practicing Scrum or Lean methods?
Are they just looking for a
visual designer or
front-end developer?
Do they have realistic
expectations? Are they
looking for a unicorn?

38. Is this a good fit for me?
• EUX is not for everyone
• Long ramp-up time, challenging subject matter
• The pace of work can be fast, but lots of starts and stops, long
tangents, pivots
• Must have patience and lot’s of curiosity about the business behind
the products
• Must enjoy working on deep, hard, usually vague problems

39. Good EUX Reads
Uday Gajendar
https://medium.com/@udanium/why-i-design-enterprise-ux-
fa74e9f12671#.rpdl6tsuq
Jordan Koschei
http://alistapart.com/article/ux-for-the-enterprise

40. Good business/tech reads
• Creativity, Inc.
• The Phoenix Project
• Scrum, Jeff Sutherland
• Team of Teams
• The Toyota Way to Lean
Leadership
• Start with Why
• The Idea Factory
• Algorithms to Live By
• Rise of the Robots
• Thanks for the Feedback
• The Power of Habit
• Holacracy
• Bold

41. @uphillhouse
www.linkedin.com/in/larry-burks-ux