Designing Enterprise Software

Enterprise software systems are notoriously antiquated and hard to use. While consumer-driven applications have evolved to be more user-centric, enterprise software systems—including ERP, CRM, supply chain management, network management, project management, BI, and domain-specific information management in fields such as accounting, HR, and legal—have remained rooted in an HCI mindset the rest of the industry left behind a decade ago. Why do enterprise product management, development, and design teams persist in producing clunky overpriced software systems that frustrate enterprise users accustomed to the elegant UI of “free” consumer apps and that incur huge hidden costs in lost productivity and training and support time? Legacy inertia, organizational silos, and risk aversion—all have combined to make the code bases of mature enterprises a mess of “spaghetti” code and stateless protocols.

Usability, learnability, and efficiency are no longer optional in enterprise software. Jeff Noble and Russell Wilson show project managers, UX designers, usability evaluators, software engineers, software testers, and requirements analysts how to do a technical analysis of a legacy system and put together a plan to wrap the system’s business logic inside a common API and then overhaul the code base with UI design and feature updates and migrate it to SaaS and mobile platforms. The authors teach you how to design and ship user-centered enterprise software by integrating your separate project management, development, and design teams into a super team making seamless pass-offs under a single plan and UX methodology. Noble and Wilson walk you through the steps for applying to enterprise software design the methods of the agile UX life cycle process that have become standard in the consumer sector—contextual analysis, user groups identification and prioritization, interview and observational user research, requirements extraction, user personas, mental models, prototyping, usability testing, iterative interaction design, and rapid UX evaluation.

Designing Enterprise Software shows you how to:

• perform a technical analysis of your legacy system
• design, evolve, and migrate your user-centered enterprise software
• integrate your project management, development, and design teams in an agile UX life cycle
• use essential user-centric tools, such as contextual analysis, observational user research, prototyping, usability testing, and iterative interaction design

What you’ll learn

Readers of this book will learn practical tips from experts on how to:

• explain the critical value of design in enterprise software to all corporate stakeholders
• perform a technical analysis of your legacy system
• design, evolve, and migrate your user-centered enterprise software
• integrate your project management, development, and design teams in an agile UX life cycle
• deploy user-centric design tools, such as contextual analysis, observational user research, prototyping, usability testing, and iterative interaction design

Who this book is for

This book is for UX designers, usability practitioners and evaluators, project managers, software engineers, software testers, and requirements analysts.