Conference summary: Enterprise UX 2023

Last year’s Enterprise UX was a blast with great talks, interesting people and fun discussions. Just in time for the next one, I’m giving a quick recap of 2023’s edition.

Introduction slide with words Enterprise UX 2023

Enterprise UX is a conference with a single track. That’s nice, because you don’t have the fear of losing out, and you see talks you might otherwise have skipped. In addition to the talks, there was also an informative visit to a mobile research lab from the Dutch Police, which is used for user research (but also for “real police work” such as requesting information in a neighborhood). Good example of how a physical object (a truck) can help explain an abstract subject (doing user research).

I’ve made a brief summary of all the talks. You can find the full-slides for most talks on the website.

Vitaly Friedman #

Vitaly Friedman gave an impressive talk with an enormous information density. He discussed, among other things, how consumer best practices do not work for enterprise UX (and which best practices do work), and how you can make an impact as a designer and how you can measure that.

consumer best practices do not work for enterprise UX
Vitaly Friedman

For people doing the work #

Enterprise UX lives in complex environments. This means UI will be complicated as well. Typical UI-best-practices (“more whitespace!”) cannot be applied mindlessly.

Examples of enterprise software — Enterprise: software for people doing the work

Complex UI without any whitespace — First thing I gave up: the notion of white space. Doctor needs to see anything in one glance, without clicking anywhere

Another complex UI without any whitespace — This is the Olympics champion of enterprise UX. “Nothing is complicated for expert users”

I fully agree with Vitaly’s statement. The complex and complicated are what draw me to B2B and enterprise applications.

I 100% agree with Vitaly there is beauty in complicated applications, that’s also why I work as a freelance B2B designer

Working with the business #

First thing you should do when working with a new company is make a chart of the organization.

LinkedIn often says “UX is the center of everything”, but this is not true:

Leadership is in the middle — In this slide Vitaly put ’leadership’ in the middle, which theoretically might be closer to reality, but in my mind organizations are complex and dynamic systems, where nothing is really ‘in the middle’

How designers see other parts of the organization: finance pays my bills, marketing announces what we built, sales does the best parties, support is boring job in another building — Ouch, this is recognizable. We designers have a bad understanding of the organization.

Frameworks #

Vitaly never worked double diamond. Instead works reverse double diamond.

The reverse double diamond: explore, deliver, insight, improve. Start with the solution. — My thoughts: interesting and thought provoking, but most frameworks are a post-factum thing. It’s never this simple.

Frameworks are basically bullshit. Some companies work very fine with waterfall

Measuring impact #

Andy Budd: design doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as most designers think - but it matters much more than most executives think — This quote sounds great, but I’m growing a bit tired of ‘defending design’ quotes in general

Design KPIs: time to complete, time to relevance, system usability scale, reading ease score, environmental impact — I like this list of KPIs, as long as we can keep them as *indicators* and not *targets*

Besides KPI you need to track how reliable the KPI is — How are we doing on the KPI? Simple color coding

NPS is the worst metric, but as everyone uses it, do tap into it.

More people were on Mount Everest than the people who visited the tenth page of your search results.

Vitaly suggests working with the KPI tree. Works great with multiple teams also:

Work with business analyst. They work top to bottom, designer bottom up. Connect UX work to business objectives.

Best practices for enterprise #

Many “best practices” do not apply to enterprise UX. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any, Vitaly has a large collection of best practices that you can ‘safely’ apply to B2B and enterprise UX:

Working with the elderly — There is a range of ages using enterprise UX. Make sure you also design for the elderly, but don’t use stereotypes and assumptions about the elderly.

Working with numbers — More information on accessiblenumbers.com

60+ will abandon product much faster when encountering problem

Vitaly ended the talk with a satisfyingly distressing video about disappointing interactions:

Marieke van Kouwen - NS #

Marieke van Kouwen gave a wonderfully sincere talk about the design of an application for material controllers of the NS.

The system that aimed to combine information sources into one system, but resulted in yet another system being added. Marieke ironically remarked: “users are so happy that they shout at me”.

It was really nice to see a case study that is not the ideal situation, how Marieke deals with that, and how the project has now got back on track.

“users are so happy that they shout at me”
Marieke (ironically)

Many information systems with many links. We thought we’d replace some, but instead added another. — There were already a lot of sources of information the users needed to investigate. Instead of replacing some (the original goal of the project), we just added one more… (obligatory XKCD reference inserted here)

User research restated as problems — That’s me! Here are some generalized user-research findings restated as problems. Powerful stuff

Edo-Jan Meijer - Dutch Police #

Edo-Jan Meijer came on stage with a fantastic opener: the impact of being excluded when something is not accessible (Edo-Jan is in a wheelchair).

Then came another great story about the UX vision of the police: software should be seen as a colleague. Which he elaborated on (what ‘human colleagues’ can expect from that digital colleague). A very impressive story, well-founded.

Shaving 12 minutes of a day, means “40.000 hours per week catching thugs” — Nice way to visualize time saved with better UX. ‘40.000 extra hours per week to catch thugs’

There are 60 designers in Dutch Police — 44.000 cops, 60 designers. And all have ’their own thing’: tasks, needs, etc.

Software as a colleague #

Edo’s convinced we should see software as a colleague and not an application. He makes a convincing argument for this.

Human characteristics: save energy, think in patterns, remember stories, are social — Humans are colleagues of software and the other way around, but they have very different strengths and weaknesses

Connect human characteristics with software — Humans want to save energy, seek patterns, remember stories, is social. So a good software colleague brings clarity, uses patterns, tells a story and is social

Software should be consistent and transparent. Effective.

Translating police values to software values. Some are the same (trustworthy), others aren’t (integrity becomes knowledgeable, courageous becomes helpful, connecting translates to target-oriented) — Software should extend the person, be a colleague. This means human-police-values do not translate 1:1 to software values. But they are related

Software completes user — Last slide showing how a software colleague complements the user

Chain of serving: software supports people, supports Dutch Police, supports Dutch society

Software makes a promise: I’m your colleague, I’m a partner in the police and I look forward to collaborate to a safer Netherlands"

Edo-Jan uses the following chain: values -> vision -> promise.

The slides tell a very strong, relatable and understandable story. It was a great experience. But looking back, I’m not sure exactly what to do concretely with all this information. Edo-Jan did a great job in looking at the system from the outside and simplifying/abstracting it, but is this usable within the system?

Usability and accessibility #

Edo-Jan was far from finished after these amazing slides and continued effortlessly into another great topic: accessibility.

Police work is difficult and diverse. The software-colleague needs to work reliably in a lot of complex environments.

Edo-Jan made this concrete by showing how different factors complicate matters:

human: all humans share some communalities, limitations and strengths
person: within ‘all humans’ are the many diverse people, all with their own histories, values, capabilities, limitations
role: the person is acting within a certain role, which has again capabilities, limitations, expectations…
activity: what you’re doing within the role (and how: on horse, on bike, etc)
device: the way you communicate with the software-colleague (Edo-Jan shows different screen-sizes, but this can also be an LLM, or a physical device)
situation: mental pressure, circumstances, experience, relationships, location, complexity of situation. Some of these factors are also ‘personal’, but of course people are not stable points, they drift in their emotions, stress-level, etc.

Visualization of the six bullet points above — A nice setup for the *slam dunk* that’s coming in the next slide

We need to design for all the paths we can take through these complications — This might be one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen of an explosion of complexity through multiplication of factors. *Of course* software design is difficult if you visualize it like this. It’s a grand finale to a logical and simple story: ‘if *this*, `<listener nods>` and *that* `<listener nods again>`, then we get *this result* `<listener gasps: oh boy!>`

Another anecdote from the talk stuck with me: Edo-Jan wondered out loud why no one knocked on his door during Corona times to ask how to deal with “always sitting inside and not being able to go to the supermarket”. As a wheelchair user, Edo-Jan is an expert in that field, but we never asked him for help. Why?

Harald Lamberts - Essence #

Harald Lamberts gave a talk that took a while for me to get into. It didn’t “click”. My first impression: “a vague story with lots of buzzwords: ‘brand promise’, ‘multi-channel interactions’, ’touch points’, ‘verticals’ and ‘horizontals’”, it sounded like Multilul (Dutch expression for bullshit)…

But eventually it all made sense. The ‘quarter fell’. Harald explained with great clarity, and now these terms are a lot less ‘buzzword’ to me and a lot more “we need these terms to explain our work well to management levels”.

I am left feeling sorry for ’the management layer’ that their work is so complex, that they need to use such vague and abstract words that carry a high risk of ’nobody understands what you’re really talking about). And I’m now more conscious about how the terms we ‘designers’ love are being perceived as multilul by our stakeholders.

With Haralds’ help I no longer turn my mind off when seeing this type of graphics. It makes sense now.

Organization causes fragmented and inefficient customer experience — There is Conway’s law! Your fragmented organization leads to a fragmented user experience: recognizable.

Aligning both top-down and bottom up from promise to journey to channel to operations — I like how this image says *aligning* and how the arrows go both ways. It’s an iterative process. I’ve seen this as a topdown one-time exercise way too many times: that doesn’t work.

Alignment: vertical (in interactions) and horizontal (between departments and channels) — Horizontal alignment across the channels – No longer sounds like something a sailor would say

Are you proud of me, Peter, for adding all these ALT-tags? Here’s the pyramid again, but now with who should work on these experiences — I’m a skeptical person, and I’m not 100% sold yet on the *management* part of this. Alignment, yes, but *management*?

Verticals, horizontals, alignment op je experience strategy, die je multi channel kunt challengen

The employee experience #

As the icing on the cake, Harald showed how they use well-known techniques such as service blueprints and journeys within companies to provide insight to managers.

Inverted pyramid: employee experience, digital EX, employee journey, employer promise & branding — Really cool inversion of the pyramid. I 100% support this effort and would like to subscribe to the newsletter. The journey(s) of employees are often ignored, and we look at them from a very small horizon. Are you for instance thinking about off boarding as an opportunity? I like the special attention to the tooling of the employees: I’ve experienced multiple times that this is just bought on basis of ‘cheapest’ or ‘most convincing talk from supplier’

Essense also provides digital tooling for this — I remember this as interactive tooling, but now these slides look like static images. I think journeys (especially for ‘aligning’) need to be highly interactive working-documents.

Jos Kauling and Rien Buisman - PostNL #

Jos Kauling and Rien Buisman had a great story about the redesign process of the PostNL app for delivery people. Apparently I was so caught up in the story that I didn’t take any notes at all 😅.

Rien had trouble convincing his stakeholders he needed research-insights, and solved this by helping out at the distribution centers himself and interviewing drivers there, and by asking ‘his’ delivery person at the door for help. Those first steps led to a better understanding of the need for research, continuous testing of the app and resulted in a very successful app.

In addition, I remembered that the existing design system was not sufficient for this app, as it was built for consumers. Instead, a specialist design system was created for this app. That’s the kind of flexibility you need for a complex enterprise app!

Ethics and design by Astrid Poot #

The day ended with absolute fireworks from Astrid Poot.

I already knew Astrid’s work from her website goedmaken.org. Her post about Hannah Arendt in particular really appealed to me: I saw so many parallels with my own work and life. I also saw Astrid’s “core and check question” before (core: does it help? And check: does it cause harm?). Powerful stuff.

No wonder I was super enthusiastic to see her talk. And she delivered: she brought tremendous energy and a lot of practical information!

I can’t really do her talk justice, so best to read her slides yourself, or better follow her on LinkedIn and buy her books.

In short:

Astrid explained how everyone is a designer, and that we as designers make choices and carry responsibility
But also that as a designer you can’t improve everything. You also have other obligations: towards your employer, yourself and your family. In that respect, many lists with ’ethical design’ are a slap in the face: how can I ever meet that?
Small steps are also steps. Look at what is within your reach: not everyone can and needs to “change the system”. As Astrid says: “reading something by Mike Monteiro is enough”
Angry people are not bad. See them as useful: they are so involved and invested that they endanger themselves and others. You just have to be able to channel that well. From frustration (destructive), to anger (power, impressive but also intimidating) to positive energy (optimism gives direction). Disobedience is good. That leads to change.
Imposter Syndrome: you project the knowledge of all kinds of different people you know onto all people. “Oh, Henk knows so much about this” and “Suus knows a lot about that”, then I am lagging behind as a designer when apparently all designers know that. I recognized that part of myself enormously (but strangely enough it often has the opposite effect for me: that it does not make me doubt or hold me back, but motivates me to learn all those things too).
The core points of Hannah Arendt. I can’t do justice to that by summarizing what Astrid had already summarized. Still, I’ll try: Amor Mundi (love the world), natality (you can always try again), plurality (everyone is different and valuable, everyone can join in the conversation)
The difference between ‘solving a problem’ and ‘changing the world’. Problem solvers analyze the situation and ‘calculate’ a solution, the solution fits into the space we know. You don’t change the world from research or a fixed process, but from personal involvement and judgment. I also recognize the latter as something ‘Hannah Arendts’: the difference between work and action. Work gives purpose, action gives meaning.

And then there was much more. If I could, I would listen to the talk again.

Be aware #

Graphic with two design-teams: one preventing crossing of sexual boundaries, the other Axe Body spray. The latter are joking “you fix what we break, hahaha” — Astrid was working on preventing sexual disease from spreading, and talked with designers from Axe who joked ‘you fix what we break’. That’s a convincing argument that we should realize: creating something also means *breaking something*. Is your work worth that?

Everyone is a designer — Similarly to the great Gusteau’s in Pixar’s Ratatouille: ‘Anyone can cook’, everyone is a designer. But that’s metaphorically of course, please keep paying me instead of trying to do my work yourself. Be aware that any change you make (whether it’s conscious or not) has an impact, it’s your choice and responsibility to deal with it.

Ethics discussions are often from an abstract theoretical perspective, difficult to apply — Philosophers make it seem like it’s *difficult* to do the right thing, needing to follow very strict rules

And be realistic #

Tristan Harris’ list of his ethics. He sets very strong boundaries for himself. Examples: “bind growth with responsibility” and “we’re constructing the social world” and “see in terms of human vulnerabilities” — Lol: these kind of lists are a slap in the face. I’m happy to *even have* a job, and now I should feel bad about not reaching these high lofty goals…

be nice for yourself and the audience for whom you are writing

A small step into being nice is already good. Not everyone has the capability to do amazingly good work.

Beware of impostor syndrome. Don’t project all the world’s knowledge onto all people, nobody knows everything. If you do that, it seems like you are the only person who doesn’t know it all. Simply not true.

Sometimes reading a bit of Mike Monteiro is already enough.

But how, Astrid? #

Cenydd Bowles says use all ethics frameworks: personal values (Aristotle), what if everything did this (duties, Kant), does it make a lot of people happy (utalitarism, Mill) — All ethics-frameworks carry problems, so just apply them all! Check: ‘Am I ashamed to have made this?’, ‘What if everyone would do this?’ and ‘Does it make a lot of people happy?’

Improvement of circumstances of humans only results from inappropriate behavior — Only people on Santa’s naughty list change history

Astrid channeling her inner Yoda: frustration leads to anger, anger leads to positive energy. But not automatically, that needs guidance. Still: angry people are good: they are committed and so invested that they endanger themselves and others. Frustration is destructive. Anger is power: imposing, but also intimidating. If you can give that a direction, it becomes optimism and energy.

What are you angry about? How do you want it to change? Who are you, uniquely, to do something about it? What will be different because you took action? — Writing the ALT-tag for this one made me realize how much the emphasis on WHAT, HOW, and YOU make this text as powerful as it is. It’s an energizing statement to turn from moping to action

There was a lot of talk of Astrid about Hannah Arendt. Best is to read Astrid’s blog posts, but here’s my short version:

Amor Mundi: love the world. People, raw materials
Natality: can always try again
Plurality: do not strive for uniformity, but to see differences as differences to do them justice. Everyone is different, and of value, everyone can join in the conversation
Hannah Arendt

Solving problems is neutral. The solution fits in the space as we know it (from research), it is reactive. Changing the world does not happen from research or fixed process, but personal commitment and judgment. Change is proactive. — This. Is. Powerful. Stuff. Real change comes from *personal commitment and judgment*. Not from research, not from a fixed process.

Civilian disobedience (without violence and in public, their contribution is constructive), versus professional disobedience. — What is professional disobedience? As a professional, or as a user? It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?

Eggs with smilies on them — Practical example of design by non-designer. A cook saw there was a lot of stress in the room, and he looked what he could do *within his reach*. Eggheads!

Core question: does it help? Check: does it breng damage? — Always ask yourself: am I helping? Am I damaging others? - not just for your intended audience, but also wider and on larger timescale. For example Facebook: it damages society over time.

Reach demonstrated in multiples, see image caption. — What is in your reach? Interest, be conscious, change within your work, change your work, create your work, change the system. Start small. Not everyone can change the system (that would be a circus also, lol)

Follow Astrid on LinkedIn. Do it. Now.

That’s it, see you at the 2024 edition!