Joe — the ambitious UX designer has by now spent most of his career working for enterprises, helping them achieve business goals…
While his UX design skills have undergone tremendous transformation over these years, he is a powerhouse of another facet of knowledge too — knowledge on enterprise processes and culture, which makes him a unique breed in the world of digital experience designers.
Here is a series of stories from Joe’s day-in-the-life which talks volumes about the life of an enterprise UX designer.
(Note: Views are completely personal, derivatives of real-life scenarios and doesn’t necessarily reflect my employers’)
Creativity & ‘Fixed Time /Fixed Price’
Joe was elated that day. Hours of scribbling, white-boarding and brainstorming with the business analyst finally paid-off — he just figured out a great way to improve the UX of the new portal the team was working on for a banking customer. What was needed was addition of just a nifty little icon on few screens, that’s it!
He proudly proposed this design solution to the team ‘internally’ next day. Everyone seemed to like the idea; ‘This would make the solution much better’ — told the BA with a grin 🙂
‘Lets not propose this to the customer’ — told the Tech lead. Remember this is a Fixed Time / Fixed Price project… 🤐
In an enterprise world, a UX designer’s role is at the intersection of business goals, user needs and ‘project commercials’
Customer Vs User
The user research phase was picking up and Joe had put his experience to good use so far! 😎
After relentless follow-ups with the help of the dynamic project manager, User Interviews were scheduled with 5 users’ from diverse groups. Everything was moving as per planned; he even reached out to further more users by sending survey questionnaires.
User research revealed a major pain-point as ‘need for media storage’. A ‘file vault’ was on top of the users’ wish-list, and that made sense too.
The weekly review meeting with the customer IT head was the right time for Joe to share the need of the user. “These users; they always are after fancy stuff!” — said Mr. ITHead 😳
Defending the user’s need backed with enough research requires not just designing skills, but a fair amount of negotiation skills too. A UX designer needs to be an efficient communicator!