If you work in an organization, take a look at how your internal processes come about. If you are an organization, look inside yourself, become aware, and ponder. Control is preceded by awareness after all.
I do believe that most of you will find that there are significantly different approaches and quality of user experience in organisational processes and how you design your product.
You pamper your product. You have a user experience team working on designing workflows, UI and interactions so you win over customers and make their experience the best that can be. Your customers should be able to do what they want efficiently, without flipping over a table or smashing a phone into a wall. Hard to get customers on the “The most frustrating experience! We guarantee you we will drive you through a wall!” slogan.
So we can clearly see why we need a good user experience within the product we are selling.
Now, look at how your internal systems and processes you interact work. Have they been designed to give you as a user a good experience or are you looking at the second page of mandatory fields, you have no idea what half of those mean and all you need is to order a new mouse or record an incident.
“System reference number:” Cool.
“Original system reference number:“… I’m just creat…. wait, what?
And it’s not just forms, but also a way how we communicate. What has changed quite a bit with Slack, Teams and others is a tendency to broadcast, so an interface will become “Are you not in this private teams group where we were talking about these things for last month? Oh yeah, you will have to read through a lot of noise and then deduct if it impacts you.”
Oh, you already have 50 of those channels? Don’t worry it will just grow.
So now when you are agreeing with me “Yeah, we have a lot of those, it really annoys me!”. I hear you, but before you throw a rock, are you without a fault? Or have you at some point in your process design said “We should design it, so we discourage people from contacting us.”?
Okay, so how did we get there?
It’s not straightforward and surprisingly, not really anyone’s fault. Even though you would love to point a finger at someone.
It all comes down to UX/business analysis experience, speed of delivery, rate of change and ultimately it all sums to money spent.
- UX/business analysis knowledge and experience – even though a lot of people take it for granted that everyone should be able to design decent UX, there is a reason why we have roles dedicated to it. Most teams don’t have it and can’t get it on a temporal basis (how difficult would be to get an experienced business analyst to help you out?).
- Speed of delivery – how many processes, systems, and interfaces are designed on the side of a desk of someone who will spend two hours in the afternoon, so will smash something out and then it will become part of daily operations?
- Rate of change – following the point 1 and 2. If we get everything well designed, how quickly can we adapt to small changes? And how can we do it continually with some strategy in mind
- $$$
“What should I do then?! You are telling me things that I already know?!” Hold your horses here…
I do believe that for most organisations, this will always be difficult to solve and deal with. One easy thing to do would be, do you tend to ask what experience your users want and design from there or do you do what is the most convenient thing for you and your team?
“When I ask someone what experience they want, they just tell me they want more from us and for us to do it quicker. Or they just gave us more work, which we don’t have time for!” Back to point 1. It’s not easy.
Just above average 