Enterprise product development and UX design is a complex process that requires a long-term product roadmap. Compared with consumer-faced product UX, enterprise product UX design must deal with a large amount of data, requiring a deep understanding of end-users workflow.
Difference Between Customer Product UX and Enterprise product UX
When building customer-faced product UX, the process focuses on the user's pain points and optimizing the user experience. The goal of customer-faced products is to be loved by users because it has to keep customers using them to generate revenue. Also, the customer product is relatively simple and based on the targeted user persona, so creating a beautiful user interface is easier than enterprise product UX.
On the other hand, enterprise product UX is for employees, and mostly higher executives make most of the purchase decisions without considering user experience; they only think if the software handles the project management requirement or business workflow. For this reason, enterprise product doesn’t have a great user experience; it is just ugly and hard to use for end-users which is unproductive and inefficient. And enterprise product UX design requires a sophisticated design process and more complex functionality than customer products.
Enterprise Product UX Design Process
Since the enterprise product UX has to deal with business intelligence, employee workflows, and collaboration, it requires understanding different perspectives, including end-users and stakeholders.
Research and Understand Users and Business Impact
Understanding end-user workflow and teamwork is critical for designing enterprise product UX. Different groups use different enterprise applications, so it should consider all aspects. Also, understanding the business objectives is essential for enterprise product UX design.
One of the advantages of enterprise product UX is that user research is more manageable than customer products because end-users are already defined and reachable. Also, it is essential to understand each end user's roles in the workplace and how they use the product for their workflow.
Build User Journey and Prototyping
Enterprise product UX design focuses on employee workflow and working routine. In this process, the UX designer creates a wireframe with end- users’ needs, focusing on simplifying the complexity. Also, enterprise product UX design aims to improve productivity and streamline employees' workflow, so UX designers consider optimizing their work efficiency more than creativity. Once the wireframe is ready, the rapid prototype will help validate the ideas.
Feedback, Iterate
Gathering feedback and iterating is the most critical process for successful enterprise product UX.
In enterprise applications, buyers, who are business executives, purchase the enterprise product for the business, and end-users, who are employees, use the product to achieve business goals. So, gathering actual end-users and decision-makers' feedback help iterate the user-centered UX design process.
Conclusion
Enterprise product UX design is different from customer-faced digital products. It requires a deep understanding of complexity, business objectives, and end-users & buyers' needs. Also, the enterprise product UX design process involves lots of user research and tests. Enterprise UX design needs a professional UX team who can handle a large amount of data and have the ability to simplify UX design.
Tacpoint, with 20+ years of experience designing digital products, can help you build and design the best enterprise product.
