Enterprise software is an incredibly massive, increasingly complex beast of a system. There are things enterprise software has historically done very well, particularly on the data side. Storing, tracking, and linking massive amounts of information and transactional data are the bread and butter of these systems. Development teams have spent decades focused on those tasks, and customers have invested millions in the systems.
However, the UX of most enterprise solutions sucks, and now customer expectations are quickly rising. Creating experiences people enjoy, that they want to use over and over again, is hard enough. Creating those experiences in applications they use to be productive in their daily work is even harder. Doing that across multiple technical frameworks, for all kinds of markets, across the expanse of business processes, sometimes feels impossible. Add in all the baggage of a company built by acquisitions and it IS impossible—you have to tackle the internal experience and culture first.
Join me for an exploration of the messes, the frustrations, the disasters, and the many, many mistakes of our team of misfit UX heroes. We’ll discuss all the great best practices that simply didn’t work, all the innovative ideas that completely flopped, the WTF moments, and how we finally turned the user-centered design process in on ourselves in an attempt to slay some dragons and finally tame the enterprise.
Over a career of almost 20 years in enterprise software, I have had the unique opportunity to make a massive number of mistakes and participate in some epic failures. Luckily, at some point I started to learn from them. I look forward to sharing how to not only recover from mistakes (even the big ones), but to use those experiences to design a better way of working.
