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Slides from talk by Rob Gillham, Principal Consultant at Foolproof at UX Brighton monthly meeting on 13th March 2012. (Apologies - there ARE some versioning issues, as I was talking using a slightly older set of slides than shown here, I hope this doesn't get too confusing or spoil anyone's appreciation of the points being made!) The theme was lessons learnt from working in b2b environments, and how to avoid some common pitfalls which UX people from the B2C space often fall foul of!
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13th March 2012
The Challenges of B2B User Experience Design
What makes it different to B2C, and why?
Robert Gillham – Principal Consultant
Part One: What Defines Good?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Essaouira_arganier_fruit_%282%29_1270.JPG
Part One: What Defines Good?
“We have now harvested most of the low-hanging fruit from the truly horrible websites that dominated the lost decade of Web usability” Jakob Nielsen January 2008
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Essaouira_arganier_fruit_%282%29_1270.JPG
What Defines Good? Ecosystems
Pension
Scheme
Member
Pension plan
online tool
B2C context
What Defines Good? Ecosystems
Consultant
Pensions
Manager
Trustee
Member
Institutional
Investor
Pension plan
online tool Client Company
B2B
context
Six lessons for UX work in B2B environments
1. Learn to ‘spot’ a B2B system
2. Innovate in small spaces
3. Identify the boss
4. Managers are not users
5. The myth of ‘compulsion’
6. Risk of ‘going native’
Learn to spot a B2B system
1. There are multiple users in the system, with complementary roles
2. The main user of the system is probably not the named main account holder
3. The use of the system ties in with other processes to meet organisational goals and are domain-specific
4. The user does not pay for a purchase with their own money, but maybe from a budget.
Learn to innovate in small spaces
• Big companies aren’t all Apple or Amazon!
• They tend to be conservative users of IT
• Computer and systems are replaced at a slower rate than consumers replace their own technology
• Smart phones, tablets etc might be unused, or even forbidden in the workplace
• Your usual array of solutions and suggestions might not work in this context
Sometimes you will have to be content with the smallest amount you can do that will have the greatest impact!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Earls_Court_Police_Box.jpg
Identify the boss
• Sometimes the marketing department may have hired you
• But you are working on the IT manager’s budget!
• Understand IT teams are subject to all the constraints and pressures we just spoke about
• This means you will find yourself under:
• Pressure to compromise
• Pressure to deliver early
• Pressure to say the UX solution is what IT were going to do anyway!
Managers are not users
• All managers fondly imagine that they can describe user behaviour accurately
• They can’t!
• Even if they used to do this job themselves
• Senior people who say they are still users usually aren’t
• Look for proxies
The Myth of Compulsion
• IT and business stakeholders often labour under the impression that they can enforce process compliance through interface design
• It is your job to disabuse them
• People tend to do the things they want to do – even at work
Don’t go native!
If you hang about the business long enough you will learn to:
• Understand a complex domain
• Know the users
• Design effective solutions
But you will also learn to:
• Compromise
• Make excuses for technology
• Realise when something is a lot of hard work
In fact you will be useless as an objective UX viewpoint!
Look for opportunities to vary your work mix, rotate on and off projects to avoid burn out
Contact
Foolproof
Harella House
90-98 Goswell Road
London
EC1V 7DF
+44 (0)20 733 6700
www.foolproof.co.uk
Robert Gillham