Title: UX for the Enterprise
Context: There is no reason whatsoever that the software you use in your business has to be so much more horrendous than the software you use in your private life.
Synopsis: Think about how much software you use in the course of your average day. A dozen different applications? 50? 100? Now think about the ones you enjoy using and the ones you hate. Odds are that your software love/hate list breaks down relatively cleanly along your work/life demarcation line. Software in life = great! Software in business = kill all the designers! And why is that exactly? Mostly because someone else is picking the software for you and your peace of mind is approximately item number 239 on their list of requirements. But know this: there are those of us working on the inside to help change this. We want to design better experiences for you the beleaguered office grunt. We fight against expedience and indifference and ignorance and slowly—oh how very, very slowly—we make marginal progress which will soon be noticeable progress until we reach the promised land of “great”! We have been to the mountaintop, and the software there is fantastic…
Best Bit: “As designers, we live to solve problems, and few problems are larger than those lurking in the inner depths of a global organization.”
via alistapart.com
Jim Bellard
An interesting view. All we need to do is spend more time using our software at home and less time using our software at work. We could try working from home but, I’m doing that and I still have to deal with corporate software.
InteractiveMark
A good point and one that IT managers are realizing much to their horror. Users are breaking outside the corporate firewall and finding their own tools and platforms to use wherever possible. Of course this presents tremendous compatibility and security issues so it behooves these same businesses to make their software better in order to keep their employees happy and engaged so they don’t feel forced to look elsewhere to find the tools that they prefer to use.