The UX Designer often may feel like they have to fight for their place at the table when the enterprise decides it’s time to innovate or update, apps or services. The CTO or CIO or a VP or Executive Director assembles the team and many department leads arrive from various tech departments. Finance, marketing and communications representatives may be included as as well. All eyes turn to IT to produce this new widget, and meeting adjourned.
In many enterprise businesses (SMB or large-scale) the interface is lumped into design. Often there is little distinction between the user experience (considering everything from the frame of mind at the moment of use to outcome provided at the end of the interaction) and the user interface (strictly speaking the appearance, functionality, and flow through the app/site/environment, in the case of VR/AR). The coder/developer may care less about what seems to be merely visual aesthetics overlaid on their solution. But this is changing.
“How will it look?” is being countered more often by “Who does it serve, and what will it do for them?” which is a good sign that Human Centered Design is infiltrating enterprise tech thinking. For the person employing Lean UX, there will also be the question, “how does outcome improve our bottom line?”
SAFe® (The Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Enterprises, www.scaledagileframework.com) has been making the case for Agile in Enterprise settings where waterfall reigned, and, as often discovered, cannot deliver at the speed and efficiency required. In acknowledging that enterprise IT deals with complex and predominantly legacy-structured operations and systems, Dean Laffingwell, the leader of SAFe, has worked on evolving SAFe through continuous improvement. The latest version, (4.5) incorporates something that will make many UX people more than happy: LeanUX is firmly placed in the canon of principles and procedures.
Jeff Gothelf’s first book on LEAN UX appeared in 2013. Since then, there have been conferences (the LeanUX NYC, organized by William Evans, which ran from 2013-2015), bootcamps, and other hands-on events to spread the concepts and practices.
Software to help UX designers work in larger and remote teams has emerged, such as UXPin, advertising itself as, “The Full-Stack UX Design Platform”. Adobe took notice of the trend and introduced their XD component in the CC Suite in 2016 (which is still in Beta, but offered freely, as it draws its raw tools from the rest of the creative suite), followed by the Experience Cloud.
The incorporation of LeanUX into SAFe 4.5 should be regarded as a major step forward in understanding the importance of being customer-centric, even beyond having great technical capabilities and IT that can change and adapt rapidly. Considering and making the user experience of interacting with the business (and within the business) easy, and, even better, desirable, matters. It can make or break a company of any size, even when the key products might not be technology-related. Amazon certainly is a fine example of the value of the experience increasing the desirability of traditionally brick-and-mortar store-bought products.
It applies as well to B2B, and even when the customer is the enterprise itself, as speed, efficiency, and being able to work successfully consistently with a workforce that may reach across town or across the world matters. Internal IT-based services have exploded in demand as technology becomes a necessity for operations.
The next question becomes how many UX skills are enough for success, and can they be spread out through the scrum team across many people or does the team need one or more specialists, be it an interaction designer or a researcher.
By putting LeanUX into the SAFe framework, this will help everyone make better decisions that create more effective teams and better results throughout the value chain.
