Implementing UX into a traditional enterprise

PJHauser

About me

Front end developer UX Architect

Currently work for a digital creative agency in Macclesfield that operates exclusively in the Pharmaceutical sector

Why me and why enterprise

During my degree I studies SAP, but also web design and programming.

SAP are the epitome of the “Enterprise”

I understood the power of technology, the needs of business and luckily my web design modules were focused around researching and profiling users.

:(

What is enterprise?

- Complexity - Bureaucracy - Scale - Process - Acronyms

A frame of mind driven by fear.

Time

Enterprise as a frame of mind

From this fear, we use waterfall as a comfort blanket

As we know, a successful project isn’t determined by a date, but by whether you achieve certain KPI’s.

Don’t think that UX can solve all the problems with this approach; but the one thing it can do is refocus a project on needs and goals as measures of success opposed to time.

Times up, lets call it a day

Enterprise as a frame of mind

Resistance to change. I combatted this with the following techniques.

Buy in Engage in discussions with the key decision makers to try and highlight benefits of a UX centric approach. I chose to highlight the fact that UX can be lean, it realises revenue independently from development projects and can be used as a platform for accessing long tail revenue streams.

Integrate Find a way to integrate into the current development process. We aligned ourselves initially to the dev team. This way we could own project scoping, and add more of a process behind this.

Quick wins We then made sure that we could increase the scope of UX on projects by adding line items on to budgets. This way we could get UX embedded in at the start of a project, and try and show the power of UX with some quick wins like Guerrilla Testing.

Independent revenue streams

Once your in start to expand

UX Audits Use a set of heuristics to determine a set of recommendations to improve an already existing product.

User insights Interviewing users with a predefined set of questions to establish their needs and extract them into a list of recommendations.

An approach for getting UX into an Enterprise

Buy in

Integrate

Quick wins

Scale it up

Develop a methodology in parallel

Now lets look at taking the helm

The aim of this methodology is to combine the design and development approaches in a single structure, whilst also trying to remain lean and agile.

It consists of 5 stages: Research sketch and plan, style tiles and components, wireframing, prototyping and build.

Setup with this model

Low setup cost

We conduct some research upfront, develop user archetypes and gather initial requirements from the client.

Project setup - Use the concept of Artefacts and Deliverables. Not all UX outputs need to be in an independent document.

Running through this model

Include UX into your development sprints

In an agile environment all of these tasks are performed for each sprint.

The main elements in this model are Deliverables.

Research, Sketch and Plan

User insights and rapid feedback loops

Research sketch and plan consists of 3 main phases, problem identification, ideation and solution modelling.

- Stakeholder interviews - Hypothesis based user stories - User archetypes - UML

Style tiles and components

A common visual language between the designers and the stakeholders

Style tiles are design components consisting of fonts, colours and interface elements that communicate the essence of a visual brand, together to help understand how they look as a whole.

Style tiles and components

Forwarded by Samantha Warren when she worked at Twitter, Style Tiles offer a snap-shop of what the site will look like, without having to design every screen.

Wireframe

Performed in parallel to Style Tiles

Wireframes create the first tangible flow through the project, generating an interactive walkthrough.

Wireframes allow UX’ers to focus on behaviours and user journeys, separating the aesthetic from the functional process.

Prototype

Combine and demonstrate

How do we show functionality. The 1st hurdle is crossed by using wireframes in the functional spec, but we’re still describing functionality in words, instead of just showing the client a prototype.

Prototypes are clear design deliverables, traditionally coded in HTML, meaning that the design output is in the same medium as the development output.

Build

Speaks for itself

At this point we take the prototype, and merge it into the final code.

This implementation may not be achievable

You may have to modify this approach, possibly heavily.

A comment on development

Tiny little bootstrap for every client

We can take the Style Tiles, and make them into HTML that will be completely modular, allowing us to rapidly iterate on designs directly in

code.

https://github.com/atomic-component-engine/ace/