management, training, and transition change management (TCM), among others. For a more thorough treatment of these themes, see Andrew Sweany and Marla Gomez’s 2007 paper on UXD and approaches to issue mitigation [ 2].
March + April 2009
[ 2] Sweany, A. and M. Gomez, M. ”Bringing the Voice of Employees Into IT Decision Making.” Intel Technology Journal 11, no. 1 (2007): 45-55.
input exists at all). End-user needs are at best addressed through mitigation tactics such as training, help systems, and communication.
User Issues. Suppliers often develop OTS solutions for the general user without considering the characteristics of individual users, their roles, their culture, geographical differences, or their work environments. Similarly, when enterprises select a supplier, they do not always take their users’ needs into account. Companies fail to study the UX gaps in the cur-
rent process and workarounds that users may have adopted. As a result, they do not understand what works well in the as-is process, what users are accustomed to, and where they have difficulties. Other user characteristics also go ignored, such as how users access the tools in their own work environments and their cultural differences (particularly in a global company).
Moreover, enterprises seldom develop a strong partnership with the supplier to address the specific needs of their users and solve UX issues. There is no collaboration with the enterprise and supplier to develop mitigation strategies that would make it easy for users to adopt the OTS solution while transitioning from the original system.
Supplier Issues. There are only a handful of large suppliers dominating the market in OTS enterprise solutions. With such minimal competition, the enterprises have fewer options and could end up choosing a solution that may not be a good fit for the company as a whole. Supplier responsiveness to enterprise requests may not be quick and flexible enough, as the suppliers who serve multiple clients are concerned with time to market and tend to focus on overall costs. Only recently has providing a better UX become a competitive differentiator.
User Experience Design. The sheer amount of variables, issues, and mitigations in these situations warrant a comprehensive approach. The user experience design (UXD) approach incorporates not only usability but also program
Phase 1 of an Intel employee self-service application project was kicked off in 2003. This phase was part of a program to upgrade a large enterprise back-end database system. The system supplier was entering the web-based, front-end application area and had just released its first generation web-based solutions in the business domain. The supplier was offering a free web-based, front-end package as part of the whole system upgrade package. After the first phase was released in fall 2004, distinctly negative feedback came in from the end users.
• Supplier-side issues. Since the web-based package was the first-generation, front-end solution built by the supplier, the supplier had not done enough usability work on the design. The product was delivered with a lot of usability issues and inflexible business processes and configuration capabilities.
• Enterprise-side issues. Due to the cost-sensitive environment at the time, and a prior vanilla back-end system upgrade, the program adopted a rigorous no-modification approach for the front-end solutions as well.
Due to the negative feedback, a Phase 2 program was kicked off in early 2005. Intel IT’s usability group was engaged to support this effort. Post-release analysis of Phase 1 clearly indicated that although there were many usability
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