It’s UX Camp London this weekend.
I intend to use my slot for a round-table discussion of what I call “UXB” – user experience for internal business support systems. By “business support systems”, I mean the (IT) systems that people inside a company use to support the business operations (order processing, ERP, HR etc.), as opposed to the customer-facing sites, systems and products.
It’s my impression that UX currently looks more at the customer-facing aspects of IT – a slick brochureware site, a great sales site that makes it easy to convert clicks to revenue, a well designed product – and that the business support systems (BSS) continue to be ugly and clunky, with “sprayed on” fields and little attempt made at orienting them to support the tasks the users need to perform. It’s this impression that I’d like to discuss at UX Camp London this weekend.
Is my impression right, or is there a lot of good UX work being done on BSS and it’s just not visible to us? The experience I have in my clients is that usability isn’t a priority when drawing up a business case, but maybe my sample is skewed. At the recent UK IIBA event on Usability & The Business Analyst we put this question to the panel, and there seemed to be some rejection of the idea that most UX is being done by digital agencies on web projects, but I remain unconvinced, and think that most UX is happening in the right-hand half of the Business Model Canvas.
If there is a lack of UXB going on, why is that, and what can we do about it? Here are some thoughts to seed the discussion on Saturday:
- The business case for customer-facing UX is easier – if we don’t do it, we’ll …
- … look like idiots
- … fail to grow
- … lose market share to slinkier competitors
- The business case for UXB is harder, because we need to measure …
- … productivity improvements
- … reduced costs from data quality problems
- … happier staff
- UXB needs to address harder problems than customer-facing UX. It’s one thing designing a website to have a consistent, usable story for selecting a book and paying for it. The business process to fulfil that order, handle the customer relationship, do the accounting, manage the procurement, hire and fire staff and so on are much more complicated. To quote a CIO pal of mine on the subject – “you can’t expect the marketing gonks to do the domain-specific business workflow for these” (there’s a man who clearly believes that UX is currently dominated by digital agencies).
- The expectations of users of BSS are growing. People come to work having used their iPhone or iPad on the commute, in their lunch hour they visit Facebook, and they go home to buy something from a slick online shop. While doing their job, they use an unintegrated set of data-oriented systems based on 3270 screens from 15 years ago. Should UXB be like giving them free coffee, to make the environment nicer? As the erudite Nick De Voil put it to me, there’s a tension in UX between the hard ergonomics of a Taylorist management tradition and a softer ethnographic approach of making users happy.
- Something that Nick De Voil, my CIO pal and I all agree on is that key to UXB is balancing the user’s needs with the business’s needs. Can they be aligned, so that everyone wins?
The above isn’t an agenda for Saturday’s session, but just some thoughts that are currently in my head. Please bring your own ideas as well. I look forward to an entertaining discussion.