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Enterprise UX design applies user experience principles to internal tools and systems -- the products and services employees use every day to do their jobs. Done well, it drives massive productivity gains, higher employee satisfaction, and tens of millions of dollars in cost savings and revenue. It's not a nice-to-have. It's a core business strategy.
What Is Enterprise UX Design?
Enterprise UX design takes the same principles and techniques used to design great customer-facing products and applies them to internal ones. Think: the software your engineers use to build proposals, the CRM your sales team lives in, the dashboards your operations team relies on to make decisions.
Savvy organisations are waking up to the fact that if great UX drives returns on the outside, it does the same on the inside.
Why Do Internal Experiences Have External Impact?
Better internal experiences directly improve external outcomes. That's the core insight.
When internal products are difficult, confusing, or slow to use, your team wastes time, makes mistakes, and gets frustrated. When those same products are intuitive, fast, and actually built for how people work, everything improves -- productivity, accuracy, employee satisfaction, and customer service quality.
The highest ROI and the best way to build a competitive advantage in the modern economy is through ever-improving UX. That applies just as much inside the organisation as outside it.
What Does Enterprise UX Design Look Like in Practice?
The First Solar Story
First Solar, a global solar energy leader, came to our team at Drawbackwards with a painful problem. When bidding on new power plant projects, their engineers relied on an industry-standard software tool to estimate energy output. It was beyond difficult and time-consuming to use, produced inaccurate results, took three hours or more per simulation, could only run on one device, and left engineers frustrated every single time.
Working side by side with Drawbackwards, First Solar redesigned their estimation process and built a new cloud-based solar energy prediction tool called PlantPredict. The results were undeniable:
- Cut production time from 3 hours to 30 minutes
- Achieved 100% internal adoption within one month
- Increased intuitiveness, creating higher user satisfaction
- Improved accuracy, leading to a higher close rate for new business, greater ability to bid on high-profile projects, and lower risk of misallocation
- Created a cloud-based solution usable anywhere, anytime, without the risk of losing data
- Increased ability to compare First Solar data to industry benchmarks, understand field performance, and improve algorithms
- Generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in time savings, plus greater opportunity for driving revenue in the future
- Won the CEO's Business Enablement Award for the project with the largest business impact in 2016
That's what enterprise UX design actually does.
What Is the Experience Success Ladder?
The Experience Success Ladder is a high-level tool for assessing the value a product or service provides today, plus the goals to aspire to. Think of it as a way to benchmark where your internal tools currently sit and where they need to go.
In our personal lives, we all know what it feels like to use a great product versus a mediocre one. Great products are easier and more enjoyable to use, so we're likely to pay more, stay loyal, be more forgiving if something goes wrong, and recommend them to our friends.
The same principles apply in the enterprise. When internal products climb the Experience Success Ladder and become more comfortable, delightful, and meaningful to use, they spark massive savings and increase satisfaction. By moving from one rung to the next, you're not only better meeting your users' needs, but also increasing your company's likelihood of success.
What Happens When Enterprises Ignore Internal UX?
Enterprise organisations that buy off-the-shelf, pre-configured software or implement products without considering user needs often find they don't work as well as expected. The consequences are predictable:
- Employees feeling lost and discouraged, resulting in dissatisfaction and attrition
- Wasted time and budget on purchase, implementation, training, and more
- Failure to meet objectives because staff can't complete their tasks efficiently or at all
- Employees developing their own "hacks" or workarounds
- Lost opportunities to provide great customer service because employees are stuck just trying to get the basic software functionality to work
On the other hand, companies that invest in the user experience of their internal systems and products often see massive results, including:
- Higher productivity and time savings
- Higher employee satisfaction
- Higher employee retention
- Higher external KPIs (such as Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction ratings, churn, operating costs, sales, and revenue) due to better customer service
Which Enterprise Departments Get the Most Value from UX?
While enterprise UX design can deliver meaningful results organisation-wide, three departments tend to see the greatest benefit.
Product: Improving the experience of using software and systems so employees and customers get what they want, how they want it.
Marketing: Clarifying and reinforcing the brand story, messaging, and content to deliver a stronger, clearer, more aligned message that improves the customer experience and drives growth.
Operations: Optimising operational tools (call centre software, business intelligence and analytics tools, CRMs, etc.) to save time, gain access to better information, and improve KPIs.
A Real-World Example: The $100,000 Billing Workflow
Consider a call centre within a company that sells a subscription-based product. The centre receives dozens of inquiries every day from members who need to update their credit card number. The process works, technically. But because it requires a phone call, it's not comfortable -- and it's definitely not delightful or meaningful.
It's also a pain for call centre reps. These are easy requests to resolve, but they eat up precious time that employees could be using to solve more important problems or drive new sales. In a recent project, Drawbackwards was able to quantify that a difficult workflow for updating billing information was costing a SaaS client $100,000 in annual operational costs alone.
What if customers could update their credit card through a self-service option? Or if the call centre software had a faster, more automated way to handle it? Eliminating that one small pain point pays major dividends in time savings, satisfaction, and retention for both sides -- and reinforces the brand message that the customer experience is easy and enjoyable. It's a win-win for Marketing, Product, and Operations.
How Does the Enterprise UX Design Process Work?
Improving enterprise UX has massive payoffs, but it doesn't have to be a massive undertaking. Tons of value can be uncovered with just a bit of research, planning, and a few minor fixes.
Here's how our team at Drawbackwards typically starts an engagement with enterprise clients:
Step 1: Ride-Along with Users
We start by sitting with your employees and observing their workflow during a "ride-along" or "field study." UX expert Jared Spool says: "While techniques, such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys can lead to valuable insights, the most powerful tool in the toolbox is the 'field study'. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering."
It's amazing how much insight you can gather just from observing employees (or anyone) in their natural environment, even just for a few minutes. Through this process, we gain a better understanding of their processes, terminology, the external and internal forces that affect their work, and more.
The ride-along exercise is hugely helpful for a few reasons:
- It's hard for people to describe their process, and they may not even realise some of the smaller steps required to get the job done. It's much easier for them to actually show how they complete tasks.
- They may overlook UX gaps or opportunities for improvement since they work so closely with their products and processes every day.
- Gaining empathy and walking a mile in the user's shoes is the fastest, best way for designers to create a great solution to their problem. When we understand the context of their situation and the pain points they're feeling, the ideas start flowing.
Step 2: Develop an Inventory of Issues
After the ride-along, we typically have pages of notes and ideas. From there, we create an inventory or backlog of UX challenges that can be resolved, organised by theme. This step helps distil and organise all of the ideas, evaluate which ones to pursue, and turn the list into an actionable plan.
Step 3: Prioritise the Inventory
Next, we split the inventory into near-term and far-term fixes based on the amount of effort the task will take and the amount of impact it will have on the company's goals and users' needs. Using an "Effort vs. Impact" chart or scoring system makes this process simpler and more objective.
Pro tip: We typically recommend starting with a few near-term fixes first. This helps add value quickly and gain buy-in from other stakeholders before tackling bigger fixes that will produce even more ROI, but will also take more time and budget to complete. For example, moving or renaming a button in call centre software or reorganising the tabs in a CRM can shave seconds to minutes off a call or sales workflow, leading to huge ROI quickly.
Step 4: Start the Design and Development Process
Then the design thinking and development process kicks off, beginning with understanding business objectives and user tasks and needs. Work quickly moves to creating flow charts that reflect the product's current and optimal workflow. After evaluating the gap between the current and optimal workflows, we can work with the internal IT and Operations teams to either design and develop a custom solution, or see what changes can be made to the existing integration to bridge that gap.
Instead of diving into design and development based on what solution would make the most sense for the business, we "draw backwards" and start with user needs research and empathy. One of the biggest UX mistakes many enterprises make today is choosing an off-the-shelf solution so they can deploy as quickly as possible to try and make an impact on corporate objectives. But if you truly want to get ROI out of an enterprise software package, you need a solution that employees will actually use to its fullest. The best way to accomplish that goal is talking to users and observing their process so you can implement a product that meets their needs.
Pro tip: Send out a UX Rings survey to employees who use the tool you're redesigning to get focused feedback from users and set baseline metrics to measure future UX improvements. (Keep in mind your UX Rings scores may be low in the beginning because the tool is purposely designed to be aspirational and set a high bar.)
Why Is Enterprise UX Design the Key to Unlocking ROI?
UX design is not about making something look good. It's a key component of the entire corporate strategy.
When John Maeda was hired as the first design partner at VC firm KPCB, he put it plainly: "My role isn't to fix pixels -- which is hard work on its own of course. My role is to find strategic insights as to where design can have the most business impact. A designer can bring a viewpoint of not just aesthetics, but economics and usage."
The businesses that are winning today are embracing this shift. They understand the world and discipline of design have evolved, and they need to evolve with it. It's not about adding features -- it's about deciding what to leave out. It's not about making a product look better -- it's about making it work better and adding more value for its users. And most of all, it's not about one moment or interaction -- it's about the overall experience.
This is also the role Drawbackwards plays: as a strategic advisor to business leaders. We identify the ROI around UX. We develop a UX plan for the organisation. We also apply "fix-pixels" execution.
Designing comfortable, delightful, meaningful products is hard, but it's everything. Intentionally designed experiences around user needs change lives, companies, industries, and the world as we know it. If you're truly looking to help your workforce be more productive, your customers feel more satisfied, and your company be more competitive, the only way to do that is to design user-centric, unique, superior experiences.
Feeling fired up and ready to improve the experience for your organisation? Our team at Drawbackwards has worked with hundreds of enterprises to help them design experiences that unlock millions of dollars in ROI and leapfrog the competition. Get in touch to learn how we can help do the same for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is enterprise UX design? Enterprise UX design applies user experience research and design principles to internal tools and systems -- the products employees use every day to do their jobs
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