It’s UX Camp London this weekend.
I intend to use my slot for a round-table discussion of what I call “UXB” – user experience for internal business support systems. By “business support systems”, I mean the (IT) systems that people inside a company use to support the business operations (order processing, ERP, HR etc.), as opposed to the customer-facing sites, systems and products.
It’s my impression that UX currently looks more at the customer-facing aspects of IT – a slick brochureware site, a great sales site that makes it easy to convert clicks to revenue, a well designed product – and that the business support systems (BSS) continue to be ugly and clunky, with “sprayed on” fields and little attempt made at orienting them to support the tasks the users need to perform. It’s this impression that I’d like to discuss at UX Camp London this weekend.
Is my impression right, or is there a lot of good UX work being done on BSS and it’s just not visible to us? The experience I have in my clients is that usability isn’t a priority when drawing up a business case, but maybe my sample is skewed. At the recent UK IIBA event on Usability & The Business Analyst we put this question to the panel, and there seemed to be some rejection of the idea that most UX is being done by digital agencies on web projects, but I remain unconvinced, and think that most UX is happening in the right-hand half of the Business Model Canvas.
If there is a lack of UXB going on, why is that, and what can we do about it? Here are some thoughts to seed the discussion on Saturday:
- The business case for customer-facing UX is easier – if we don’t do it, we’ll …
- … look like idiots
- … fail to grow
- … lose market share to slinkier competitors
- The business case for UXB is harder, because we need to measure …
- … productivity improvements
- … reduced costs from data quality problems
- … happier staff
- UXB needs to address harder problems than customer-facing UX. It’s one thing designing a website to have a consistent, usable story for selecting a book and paying for it. The business process to fulfil that order, handle the customer relationship, do the accounting, manage the procurement, hire and fire staff and so on are much more complicated. To quote a CIO pal of mine on the subject – “you can’t expect the marketing gonks to do the domain-specific business workflow for these” (there’s a man who clearly believes that UX is currently dominated by digital agencies).
- The expectations of users of BSS are growing. People come to work having used their iPhone or iPad on the commute, in their lunch hour they visit Facebook, and they go home to buy something from a slick online shop. While doing their job, they use an unintegrated set of data-oriented systems based on 3270 screens from 15 years ago. Should UXB be like giving them free coffee, to make the environment nicer? As the erudite Nick De Voil put it to me, there’s a tension in UX between the hard ergonomics of a Taylorist management tradition and a softer ethnographic approach of making users happy.
- Something that Nick De Voil, my CIO pal and I all agree on is that key to UXB is balancing the user’s needs with the business’s needs. Can they be aligned, so that everyone wins?
The above isn’t an agenda for Saturday’s session, but just some thoughts that are currently in my head. Please bring your own ideas as well. I look forward to an entertaining discussion.
Good point Nick, I remember this matter being raised at the ‘Usability and the Business Analyst’ event and I found it a very interesting point to think of.
Having very little work experience yet, I can already corroborate that what you described above happens.
In the company I work for our timesheet system lacks sexiness in every way. I don’t know how old it is, but it was internally developed and, as with other internal sites and apps, the layouts are unappealing and often not intuitive.
I believe there are two reasons for it:
1- the person who developed it lacks basic notions of UX design;
2- the applications and sites were built for a purpose only: functionality! Because it is not a client-facing app or website, there is no concern about how it looks like or how easy it is to use.
The repercussion is a poor user experience for employees and, at times, a waste of time trying to find the menus and/or tools we need.
On the other hand, perhaps it wasn’t worth the resource investment in a better UI, in terms of financial gain.
Thanks, Irene. For me, your point (2) is the key one – if we could get people to care about things other than raw functionality/data capture for BSS UIs, point (1) would follow along on a lead, I think.
There were some good (and also frustrating!) discussions around this at yesterday’s barcamp. I’ve put a quick note here, and I’ll pull together a summary of the UX/Enterprise UX track later.
Nick, it’s great to hear about your UXB session. If I were in the UK I would have been there. Please post any slides or notes so we can know how it went.
I work at the University of California at Berkeley. At the recent event, I asked if any of the approximately 200 attendees were business analysts. Consistent with my experience elsewhere, no one raised their hand.
This said to me that although BA and UX concerns and goals have much overlap, there is a kind of social divide that is in our best collective interest to overcome. You’ve taken a welcome step in that direction. Thank you.
Thanks, Rachel. I noticed your article about the BA/UX continuum on ModernAnalyst.com earlier in the week. Thanks also for the link to the InfoCamp event.
Yes, I see a substantial (but from from complete, obviously) overlap between what BAs do and what UX folk do. Both are huge spaces, though, and it’s interesting to think about what overlap is for any one individual, who operates onto in small part of those spectra.
Something I’m thinking about at the moment is the extent to which BAs and UX people specialise in sectors or knowledge domains. While there are some BAs who claim that because the techniques we use are generic we can operate equally effectively in different industries, I don’t believe that’s true. As a BA who knows about telecommunications, retail and transportation, I’m not going to be as effective working in, say, an investment management project, and no IT development manager is going to give me that gig. My impression is, though, that UX isn’t yet mature enough to have that distinction, and there seems to be an assumption in practitioners that because you can design a great online shop, you can equally well design a great experience for telecoms engineers configuring a wide-area Ethernet service with quality of service partitioning. I think that is, um, naive
Great that this area is being taken seriously. There is often a need to capture a lot of information so the point shouldn’t be to reduce the number of fields, just a more considered approach to UI design that actually makes these systems obvious and easy to use by supporting the tasks of the user without too much cognitive effort.
Yes – in telco there’s a LOT of information that needs to be captured to define and deliver a service, and that doesn’t go away just because we want a better user experience. We need a way to manage the capture, presentation, communication and manipulation of that data that improves the UX.
While I know telco, I imagine the same is true of other sectors in the own specialised way. That’s one of the reasons I believe that UX designers, like business analysts, need to have specific sector knowledge to be effective.
Just to add a twist to this. I’m also a big believer in domain knowledge, and as someone who’s put a lot of time and effort into developing subject matter expertise in one particular sector (investment banking), I’d love to agree that UX designers need specific sector knowledge to be effective. But in fact one of the best teams I’ve worked with contained designers who were not sector experts and didn’t want to be. They were individuals with outstanding generic conceptualisation and problem-solving skills, and because they were new to the field, they asked all sorts of questions that I would have been embarrassed to ask, but which helped them to frame the design problem and produce a good solution to it. So my ideal team would contain some people who do have sector knowledge, and some who don’t.
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