Decision makers, forced adoption, and domain experts: 3 user research challenges in enterprise software
User-centered design is a toolset for delivering products people will use and love — regardless of what you’re building or who you’re building it for.
However, designing applications to help people accomplish their jobs on a daily basis comes with its own set of challenges, distinct from consumer-facing software. These three challenges may be obvious, but sometimes the simplest things slip under the radar and trip you up later on.
The person buying (or sponsoring) your software probably won’t be using it.
If you build software for a SaaS company, access to users can often be a challenge. In most cases the person you have the most access to is the individual responsible for buying your company’s software. If you design tools in-house, this ‘buyer’ may be in reality a VP or other executive sponsor of some sort.
For either scenario, the same is true: this person will probably not use your software. If they do, it will likely be in a much different way than the majority of users.
Why is this a challenge?
The decision maker’s perception of your work is going to be based largely on budget and general competency to get the job done. You may find the true end users will be more concerned with usability, accuracy, and how quickly and efficiently they can complete their tasks.
How to deal with it
Don’t just listen to the highest paid person in the room. Identify your true users and find a way to get them involved in the process, even the smallest amount will drastically improve the finished product.
Your end users likely don’t have a choice when it comes to using your application.
People show up to jobs and are given a set of tools to work with. These tools often abuse business users with some of the worst interfaces and overall experiences out there.
Professionals are rarely given a choice when it comes to enterprise software solutions that support vital business processes. They are typically built by another company or department with a high level understanding of the domain, but usually without the time or resources to fully understand the end users’ goals and pain points.
Why is this a challenge?
With consumer facing applications, adoption rates serve as an indicator of product success in the absence of more sophisticated metrics. If users are unsatisfied, they’ll simply move on to another solution.
In enterprise software, as long as the decision maker is happy, you may not hear about user frustrations and challenges. When they are required to use a tool for their job, usage analytics alone will not tell the true story of their experience using your product.
How to do deal with it
Similar to the challenge above: get a diverse perspective when it comes to user feedback. Validate your usage analytics with qualitative data from a cross section of user types. Push to understand the experience of all users, not just the executives.
Trusting the experts without letting them design for you
User research is a critical part of enterprise user experience design because often we are dealing with problem spaces that are complex and super specific to the organization/industry we are working in. Designers need the ability to absorb and process domain experts’ knowledge and tease out their true goals and challenges.
Why is this a challenge?
This knowledge gap can make it tempting to over rely on your expert users and allow them to prescribe the solutions to the problems you are trying to solve. In the same way a doctor listens to a patient’s symptoms and makes the diagnosis themselves, designers should rely on their expertise to create potential solutions for their users’ problems.
How to deal with it
Don’t take proposed solutions from domain experts at face value. Keep asking ‘why?’ and get to the root of their problems without settling for quick fixes.
Also, keep beginner and intermediate users in mind. Not everyone using your system or tool will be an expert, so make sure to account for a broad spectrum of user fluency.
