How to be user-centered with enterprise solutions?

Question

I work in a large organisation with a culture shift to configuring enterprise solutions, buying solutions or building sofware - if no options are available.

In my experience, enterprise solutions have notoriously bad UX and cannot be easily changed to meet users needs and are often considered based on a feature checklist over user goals. This is sometimes compounded by no consideration to the total cost (UX Debt, productivity etc), just perceived savings (money).

Does anyone have any experience/advice on implementing a user-centered Design Process or techniques with configured or bought enterprise software?

Answer 1

I think the better way is start with baby steps, if you have a team try to convince your manager about the UX process. In beginning probably you can't do some research, but can do some prototypes and help developers, or you can do a usability/heuristical analysis, but these actions have a purpose: Show the company how can they save money investing in UX.

You probably can't do all the process before the baby steps, it's difficult but necessary.

Read more in: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-model/

Answer 2

I totally agree with the above answer - small steps, we were gaining momentum with UX. But a shift in mindset has impacted this.

Some research has led me to this process for Configure: User Research (Interviews (Goals, context) Prototypes (based on constraints of a system) User test Demo prototype to stakeholders Dev Handoff

Buy End-User of system on panel for procurement or Goal-based Personas (thoroughly researched) Heuristic Review by specialist with estimation of UX debt

Answer 3

Base your redesign approach on KPIs. How can a redesign help the business with its goals? Many common enterprise goals include:

1. Reducing number of support calls and other contacts. You can gather data by looking at support ticket backlogs and talking to support leads and relationship managers. What questions do they have to keep answering over and over that UX can fix?
2. Improving client retention / reducing churn. Losing clients to competitors is expensive. You might be able to find at-risk or non-renewing clients and interview them to see why they'd leave (or have already decided to leave).
3. Improving acquisition rates. If your software has a demo or sandbox that clients can try before the sign the contract, you could survey or interview the non-converting ones to see what the UX concerns were.

You can start small, as others have mentioned, by picking one metric to improve and showing results. Any time you can quantify improvements and use them to calculate ROI, you'll improve your chances of getting buy-in. There are many books, classes and resources on how to do this. MeasuringU is a good place to start.