No-one would argue that good UX isn't essential for customer on-boarding and retention in the B2C space. However, enterprise software has some catching up to do. We put up with sincerely horrible and unusable UIs when we're at work. Yet most employees are regular consumers too, and the difference of experience between work and home is more and more difficult to justify, from the users’ perspective.
Besides satisfaction, benefits for better UX include efficiency, so why is enterprise software still so poor in 2018? One often stated reason is security, but every piece of software needs to be secure - this isn't specific to enterprise. Is it because the problems are more complex in industry, and more difficult to design? Is it because software started to be used in the enterprise a long time ago, and there is a lot of legacy? Is it because the people in charge of buying enterprise software are not the actual users? Or, perhaps, designers are not excited about designing for enterprise? It doesn't matter. With greater mobility, comes the need for seamless experience.
Why are many tools employees have to use so incredibly clunky? No company can function without providing tools to their employees for various tasks such as claiming expenses, booking travel, time recording, etc. but the majority of these are difficult to use. There certainly seems to be a big gap between software people use privately as well as professionally.
This UX workshop will explore why this is the case. We'll kick off the discussion with a number of presentations but the majority of time will be spent in a hands-on workshop where delegates explore and identify needs and pain points through a technique called 'Experience Mapping', followed by a creative 'solutions thinking' session. All results will not only be shared on the day but also published as a CW blog. With this session, we'll attempt to discover the reasons for such dichotomy, the steps that are taken to fix it, and debate the way we need to design for future workers.
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