DeutschLast year designer Uday Gajendar wrote this interesting post about why he designs enterprise UX suggesting more designers should follow suit. This is pretty much in the vein of another article by fellow designer Dave Malouf.
I very much agree with this point of view. User experience in enterprise software generally has a huge potential for improvements that impact thousands of users in a meaningful way. Yes, enterprise software often isn’t exactly nice to look at, cumbersome to use and generally not the first example you’d think about when it comes to a delightful user experience.
However, this is exactly what makes working on enterprise UX so worthwhile:
Making design improvements that allow (hundreds of) thousands of people to work more efficiently and make more meaningful use of their limited time – not to speak of the positive impact these changes might have at a larger scale: Large enterprise companies, infrastructure, hospitals, educational institutions and government services directly and indirectly influence the lives of a lot of people. Improving how these organizations work creates multiplying, in some cases even exponential, positive effects.
The subject of enterprise UX and enterprise software in general also always reminds me of William Gibson’s famous quote: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Sure, working on some new shiny social messaging app might seem cool and interesting at first but making significant progress in that area not only is tremendously difficult but also not particularly likely to have a meaningful impact on lots of people’s lives. Enterprise software on the other hand – though there have been lots of improvements in that area in recent years as well – often is still severely lacking in terms of usability when compared to the consumer apps we’ve come to get used to.
If you’d like to discuss enterprise UX further (or other subjects related to enterprise software development), please send me an email.
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