UX as part of your Enterprise Architecture

Digitalization within enterprises is still growing rapidly, enterprises are more and more adopting digitalization in every aspect of the daily processes and are moving to more intelligent and integrated systems. Even though a lot of work is being done in the backend systems and a lot of systems are developed and modernized to work in the new digital era a large part of the work has to do with UX User experience.

A large number of enterprises are still lacking in building a good and unified user experience for internal users. It has been thought for long that user experience was more applicable for the external systems such as websites, webshops and mobile applications. It is however evenly important to have a good and clear view on the internal user experience.

Internal user experience

Internal users, your employees, will use the systems developed on a daily basis. Ensuring the systems are simple to use, do what they promise and provide an intuitive experience will add to the productivity. Additionally, ensuring that systems are easy to work with and provide a good experience will ensure that your employees are more motivated and adoption of new systems will be higher

UX as an enterprise architecture component

In the past, it was common that every system within an enterprise would have a different experience. Menu structures, screen structures and the way a system behaved was different per application. As an employee normally interacts with multiple systems this can become overwhelming and complex. Additionally, it is relatively common that all internal enterprise user experiences are, to put it mildly, not that good. Most common, every system has a suboptimal interface and an interface design which is different from the rest.

An advised solution is to include standards for UX and interface design into the Enterprise Architecture repository and ensure, depending on your enterprise size, you have dedicated people to support developers and teams to include your enterprise UX blueprints within the internal applications.

When UX and interface design is a part of the enterprise architecture standards and you ensure all applications adhere to the standards the application landscape will start to become uniform. The additional advantage is that you can have a dedicated group of people who build UX components such as stylesheets, icons, fonts, javascripts and other components to be easily adopted and included by application development teams. At the same go, if you have dependency management done correctly, a change to a central UX component will automatically be adopted by all applications.

Having a Unified Enterprise UX is, from a user experience and adoption point of view one of the most important parts to ensure your digital strategy will succeed. 

Add UX consultants to your team

Not every developer is a UX consultant and not every UX consultant is a developer. Ensuring that your enterprise has a good UX team or a least a good UX consultant to support development teams can be of a large advantage. As per Paul Boag the eight biggest advantages of a UX consultant for your company are the following:

1. UX Consultants Help Better Understand Customers
2. UX Consultants Audit Websites
3. UX Consultants Prototype and Test Better Experiences
4. UX Consultants Will Establish Your Strategy
5. UX Consultants Help Implement Change
6. UX Consultants Educate and Inspire Colleagues
7. UX Consultants Create Design Systems
8. UX Consultants Will Help Incrementally Improve the Experience

Adopt a UX template

Building a UX strategy from scratch is complex and costly. A common seen approach for enterprises is that they adopt a template and strategy and use this as the foundation for their enterprise specific UX strategy.

As an example of enterprise UI and UX design, Oracle provides Alta UI which is a true enterprise grade user experience which you can adopt as part of your own enterprise UI and UX strategy. An example is shown below:

The benefit of adopting a UX strategy is that, when selected a mature implementation, a lot of the work is already done for you and as an enterprise you can benefit from a well thought through design. Style guides and other components are ready to be adopted and will not require a lot of customizations to be used within your enterprise so you can ensure all your applications have the same design and the same user experience. 

The above shown presentation from Andrejus Baranovskis showcases Oracle Alta UI Patterns for Enterprise Applications and Responsive UI Support