As User Experience (UX) becomes increasingly critical to improve user efficiency and drive business outcomes, enterprises are upgrading their tools to streamline complex workflows and enhance productivity. While we always recommend following a complete UX process, some projects have constraints that require a contextually applicable version of that process.
For enterprises, it is always a race to be faster than the competition, often leading to hasty product updates or condensed project timelines. The challenge for designers is maintaining high-quality outputs with limited time for a complete UX process.
We can overcome these challenges through a pragmatic UX process fit for enterprise environments to produce quality products, without compromising on time-to-market, as follows.
The first step to starting any project is investing in a comprehensive project kickoff. This is crucial since enterprises can't afford to redo work due to misaligned assumptions at the outset. Before any design files are opened, it’s critical to have sufficient time to meet with all stakeholders on the project, including:
For example, while working with a financial services firm to redesign the world’s leading wealth management terminal, speaking with cross-functional stakeholders helped us understand the considerations in designing a product for their specific financial market audience and the existing inefficiencies of the product. Keeping a record of these goals and expectations is an optimal way to align on project objectives and to serve as a central reference for later project phases.
When working with large organizations, one of the first things we ask for is any existing user research. These companies often have a wealth of valuable data from past surveys, interviews, and usability studies. Leveraging this research allows us to quickly identify pain points and opportunities without the delay of launching a new research initiative. However, it's essential to first evaluate the relevance and timeliness of the data to ensure it aligns with relevant workflows and project goals.
Further, while securing maximum research resources from the client remains crucial, it's essential to have a plan to conduct research within a limited timeline. Pragmatic UX achieves this by:
Enterprise clients often, rightly so, seek to focus more on how efficiently their tools enable their users, rather than how sleek an interface looks. Pragmatic UX embraces this mindset by:
For example, when redesigning the central editorial tool for our client, the world’s leading news organization, journalists were comfortable with the user interface that existed, but there were inefficiencies in navigation and sharing content with other editors. Prioritizing workflow optimization proved to be more valuable in this case, than focusing on the visual redesign of the tool.
Additionally, creating a new visual style or design system may present challenges with brand guideline alignment and software development, and requires dependencies on other teams, a process that often leads to lengthy wait and approval times in large organizations.
In another example, when working with one of our financial services clients and presenting designs to senior stakeholders focused on bottom-line outputs, they had difficulty seeing how low-fidelity wireframes would translate to the final product. In this case, as counterintuitive to standard UX practice as it sounds, transitioning to high-fidelity designs as quickly as possible allowed them to understand the redesign of the updated product.
Low-fidelity designs are still useful to quickly iterate on new concepts for components and complex interactions, but enterprise clients often prefer seeing designs in near-final form so they can provide concrete feedback and move faster toward implementation. In this case, pragmatic UX pushes for:
Although accelerating high-fidelity designs provides a clear picture of the end-product for senior stakeholders to review, when they are highly engaged with the entire design process, feel free to include them in the iteration process from low-fidelity to high-fidelity. Showing low-fidelity designs will help them think more freely in terms of what the product could become, since the low-fidelity rendition looks markedly different from what they know to be the real-world product.
A pragmatic UX approach encourages simultaneous workstreams, where design and development teams work in tandem. As design sprints are completed, designs are delivered to developers to begin implementation. Having design and development work in a collaborative pipeline allows:
The design team should always be at least one sprint ahead of development to make sure there is room for iteration. Problems can arise if design changes need to be made after implementation, leading to lengthy delays. The best way to avoid this is to maintain constant communication between designers and developers to allow issues to be identified as quickly as possible and prepare efficient solutions.
AI is being touted as the silver bullet in speeding up the product design process. While it is very promising, we have found that in practice for real-world enterprise production projects, it can be relied upon for only a few aspects of the UX process, like research synthesis and design ideation.
It’s also exciting to see tools enabled with AI to improve productivity. Figma recently came out with several AI-enabled productivity tools. We have also used Dovetail successfully for a streamlined AI-powered user research process. Additionally, we experimented with building a product from zero to one with the use of AI, with some insightful results. Ultimately, we still need to rely on a human-led approach, with AI accelerating specific aspects of the entire process.
In fast-paced enterprise environments, a pragmatic UX strategy offers a powerful solution for delivering high-quality products without sacrificing speed. By emphasizing strong upfront onboarding, streamlined research, workflow-focused design, high-fidelity prototypes, parallel progress between design and development, and judiciously leveraging AI, pragmatic UX aligns perfectly with the needs of large organizations looking to swiftly ship valuable product features.
It empowers teams to make smarter decisions quickly, reduce rework, and stay focused on creating efficient, user-centered solutions that enhance user productivity and business value.
Ready to upgrade your product with a pragmatic UX process? Let’s talk.
