Mobility continues to change the way we do business at a dramatic rate. It can help organizations operate more innovative and quickly at a lower cost. As enterprise mobility strategies take shape, organizational and technical challenges are soon overcome; companies can focus on users and start to deliver required mobile business apps on top of their enterprise mobility platforms.
The new chapter of mobility creates a new challenge – the User Experience (UX). Mobile enterprise solutions are competing against beautiful and intuitive consumer apps, which employees and customers love from their private smart devices. Consumerization is the driver that forces enterprises to change their established processes and seek for external support. Gartner reported that across all vertical industries, strong user experience capabilities where regarded as a highly important criteria, by more than 60% of all companies, when selecting external service providers.
How can companies build strong user experience capabilities or deliver solutions with good usability? – Although there is a difference between the concepts of usability and the hyped UX, in practice both terms are used to describe the same thing in the corporate world:
“Usability can also be understood as the ‘absence of frustration’ in using a product, and it is invisible in a way that only the lack of it will be noticed and cause dissatisfaction and complaints.” (Rubin & Chisnell, 2008)
UX is influenced by all aspects of the end user’s interaction with the product and not just by visible pixels on the screen:
- Context awareness: show only location relevant data or add useful contextual information based on user’s context – Where / When / Who / What / Why
- Integration: leverage Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), ActiveDirectory or Kerberos capabilities to enable Single-Sign-On and minimize burden to enter complex passwords on small touch screens
- Balance: between a consistent corporate style and an unique app design which emphasizes the special purpose of a given task
- Reduce to improve: focus on users and start with the simplest possible solution to achieve a given task
UX is influenced by business, design and technical aspects and can’t be resolved by one person – The Super UX Architect -, it is the result of teamwork and a strong process, which is able to iterate, fail, change and learn.
The process creates an iterative environment, which is able to fail, fail fast and learn. A combination of best practice methodologies provides the right tools for the job:
- User Centered Design (UCD): focus on users, capture their real needs and develop effective solutions to their requirements
- Agile Development: change is consistent throughout the project; agility is important and allows the team to react quickly
- Continuous Delivery: deliver and fail faster with continuous user involvement and an ability to learn from feedback
- Extended Analytics: gather insights of usage, adoption, retention and/or engagement for an upcoming release iteration
Since all those best practices are well known, it is interesting to see that many projects are still failing because UCD and active user involvement are practiced at the initial design phase of the project, but not kept consistently throughout the project and especially during the build phase. After weeks or even months of development, the product evolved in a different direction as the user required during the design phase. Rapid prototypes help to validate the initial requirements, but it is crucial to maintain an iterative process from the beginning to the end of the project and keep the user involved at any time.
As the delivery team is focused on creating the best possible solution for the users, maintaining the continuous user involvement is a technical challenge and needs to be resolved by an automated process. Integration of DevOps or continuous delivery technologies are not just improving the development process, they will also help to improve the user experience by bringing end users and the delivering team closer to each other and foster an active and ongoing communication.
A seamless best-practice combination of an UCD approach, agile development methodology and overall iterative continuous delivery process is key to increase the delivered user experience.