This week I’ll be profiling a few of the people attending Jive’s Enterprise UI Summit, which is Thursday & Friday in Aspen.
What are you currently focused on at SAP?
My title is Director of Business Operations. I have been working at SAP for over ten years, and for more than half of that time I have been working on implementations of SAP software internally. For the past few years I have been focused on our intranet, for which we won the Norman Neilsen Top Ten Intranets last year.
Now that the implementation is fully operational and integrated into how our employees work, I am moving into new areas, including collaborative technologies or social media. Since I completed my PhD in Anthropology in 2004, I have been working to bring social science methods to the business world in a meaningful way. In addition to my technical work I have also been managing a small User Experience (UX) team, which conducts user research internally, and supports the information architecture and design of both the intranet and the systems (like CRM) integrated to it. The UX team is now also working with me on the social media topics, as our focus moves more in that direction.
Is there such thing as an Enterprise User Interface? What does it mean to you?
At this point, I am not sure that there is a distinct Enterprise UI, but I am hoping to learn more about this point-of-view during the Summit. Things that would make an EUI distinctive include:
- a focus on execution of processes and tasks that occur only in a corporate context, and
- corporate branding.
Unfortunately, when I think of Enterprise and UI in the same sentence, the words bland and unimaginative come to mind. I think it has something to do with the word enterprise itself. I had a quick look a wiktionary.com. After the first definition:
a company, business, organization, or other purposeful endeavor
the definitions get much more appealing:
an undertaking or project, especially a daring and courageous one
and finally
a willingness to undertake new or risky projects; energy and initiative.
That said, I think the limited variation and appeal of software in the enterprise space has more to do with the nature of corporations in general (risk adverse, slow to change, fiscally conservative due to shareholder focus) than what is possible in interface design today.
What makes a good UI?
In the simplest terms, consistency and ease-of-use makes for a good UI. The UI (and of course the system underneath it) has been effectively designed if the end-user can effectively execute all critical aspects of the process or task. Finally, the information architecture in which the UI resides is also critical.
What are some examples of good and bad Enterprise UIs?
In general, my experience has been that each individual system or tool is generally tolerable, but in reality, users are using many different tools and interfaces in the course of their work. It is the co-existence of and variation in those systems that presents the biggest challenge. From my experience, it is the complexity of the changing work context itself that generate the biggest UI problems.
Why is enterprise software user interface and user experience been a lack of focus, historically?
For the most part, an EUI doesn’t have to win over its users. An employee is essentially trapped – they need to get their job done, and there is only one system available to execute their work. So for business systems, we may not see poor UI reflect in adoption statistics, but the problems will show in time-to-task completion, data quality, or lack usage for non-required tasks.
When I pitch the importance of user experience at work, I talk about the need to consider technology, business, and user requirements simultaneously. Generally speaking, the idea of user requirements as distinct from business requirements is a new concept for many executives from traditional IT or consulting backgrounds. In the end, I don’t think we’ll see a real focus on user-centered design until we can quantify the business impact of not doing it.
Do you see change occurring and if so, what’s driving that change?
During the dot-com boom, people purchased and used technology for technology’s sake. However, after 9/11 and the economic downturn in the U.S., the nature of the high-tech industry changed. There has been a growing focus on the user or consumer, and it has really changed how and what software sells.
There are a number of other factors that are even more current – the arrival of Gen Y’ers to the workplace, for example. In addition, large companies like SAP and Oracle are focusing even more on the small and mid-sized enterprise market as the higher end of the market gets saturated. Users in small companies are not as likely to be tolerant of installations with a large footprint, nor a complex UI. I also think that brand recognition continues to gain in importance, and so there is a need for a distinctive, recognizable ‘look’. That alone may drive us from enterprise to enterprising in the years to come.
What’s uniquely hard about designing for enterprise software?
How do you delight users who – regardless of what you present to them – are required to use the system to execute the task at hand? I have been thinking about this problem (which I call Project Delight) for many months now, you can read my initial thoughts about it here.
What do you hope to get out of the Enterprise UI Summit this week?
I am really looking forward to meeting others working in product management and user experience in the corporate setting. I have always been a big, big fan of Adobe software, and I am very curious to learn more about what Google is up to in the enterprise space. I am also looking forward to learning more about what’s coming with Jive’s Clearspace suite, so that I can start to pitch the enhancements to our internal implementation after the Summit!
