3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 1 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

Search this website…

Enterprise UX essentials – the virtues andEnterprise UX essentials – the virtues and

perils of simplicityperils of simplicity

March 20, 2015 By Jon Reed

84 Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Google+

SUMMARY: UX designer/instructor Everett McKay has a way of cutting through theEnterprise UX noise. In part two, we get into the elusive pursuit of design simplicity,the personas debate, and software’s overly-hostile personality.

One of the best parts of attending Everett McKay’s UX design class was learning how heapproaches design simplicity. We’ve heard plenty on the virtues of simplicity in Enterprise UX, butnot enough about the tradeoffs – or how to make it a design reality.

McKay also has sharp views on the personas debate(when they work/when they don’t), influenced bywhat he saw firsthand at Microsoft. (You may wantto also check out the first part of this feature fromlast week, Enterprise UX is communication – beyondUX cliches).

A simple UX – not simple toachieve

McKay began the “Make it simple” section of his course with a definition of design simplicity:

Home About Work with us Let’s Talk The Team

Business Government Technology Partners

Shares

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 2 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

“Simplicity is the reduction or elimination of design elements that target users are aware of andconsider unessential.”

But that definition is loaded with challenges. Designers tend to get a bitcarried away with aesthetic touches. McKay counters that with a quotefrom Alan Cooper: “No matter how cool your interface is, less of it wouldbe better.”

We learned this the hard way at diginomica before a radical pare-down ofour initial interface. As Den Howlett put it at the time, ‘Love it or hate it we

realized a long time ago that pretty pictures and a slick design don’t do it for the buyers we wantto reach.’

But it’s the “unessential” aspect that’s the kicker – too often, a dramatically pared-down designburies or eliminates functions we rely upon (high on my own list: the Windows 8 “Start menu”brouhaha). As McKay says, “Removing the essential isn’t simplicity, it’s bad design.” Or, as AlbertEinstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Here’s McKay’s slide on why design simplicity matters:

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 3 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

Image used with permission of Everett McKay. This content is available in his UI is Communicationbook.

McKay recommends the following simplification techniques:

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 4 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

Image used with permission of Everett McKay. This content is available in his UI is Communicationbook.

My personal fave is “detail on demand” – the most effective designs might be complex, but theyshield that complexity, revealing it only when needed. (If you’re curious on terminology, here’smore on design constraints and controls/natural mapping).

Weighing in on the personas debate

In UX circles, the value of researching and creating personas has been subject to considerabledebate. McKay experienced the challenge of using personas firsthand while on the Windows teamat Microsoft. As McKay told our class, Microsoft invested heavily in personas for Windows Vista,but phased them out completely starting with Windows 7. McKay isn’t backing away from thevalue of personas, but he has some caveats:

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 5 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

Keep persona definitions simple – a page or two of bullet points at most for mostprojects. “At Microsoft, the Windows Vista team had 20+ page documents for each persona,says McKay. “That was just way too much detail, so few people bothered to read them.”Focus the persona on the specific feature you are designing. “The only purpose ofpersonas is to help your team make better design decisions. If an attribute isn’t relevant tomaking decisions, get rid of it—it will only get in the way,” says McKay. “If you’re designing asearch feature, for example, focus the personas on how your different target users performsearch. That’s all you need.”Don’t bog your personas down with hobbies and off-topic interests. It’s common touse a first name and a photo for each persona. But beyond that, McKay cautions againstadding extraneous human touches: “Many people include personal details in their personaslike hobbies, or what I like to call the ‘4 Cs’: details about the persona’s children, coffee, cars,and cats. But unless these details shown influence design decisions, the personas are morepractical without them.”

McKay concludes: “I have noticed that developers especially hate being asked to use personaswith such irrelevant personal details. Using simpler, more focused personas will help get yourdevelopers on board.”

All software has a personality – avoid the hostile side

If Enterprise UX is communication, then the logical extension is McKay’s view that “all software hasa personality.” In our podcast, we got into how software tends to reveal a very hostile side of thatpersonality when errors occur. Often, the error messages come with “life or death” language, andnuclear warning symbols that ratchet up the absurdity. McKay:

On the developer side, we have a history of extremely harsh language. So we useterms like, “Catastrophic, abort, terminate, kill.”… It’s not a big deal at all, but the errormessage looks like we’re on nuclear lock down. It’s just a horrible visual experience,and the text is horrible as well.

I’ve picked on Microsoft a bit, but here we have a classic example from Apple of using bombimagery for an error:

“

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 6 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

McKay showed our class several examples of a better “software personality”. When one strays offthe happy path with WordPress, you won’t see a lighted fuse. Instead, they throw “Matt” under thebus:

Perhaps it’s not a perfect example; refreshing the page without other possible resolutions isn’t allthat satisfying, but at least the error message has an informal, “we’re all in it together” context.

Wrap: next UX move for enterprises – start training

I’ve run into plenty of companies that lack UX resources. So if you want to bring UX designsensibilities into your shop, where do you begin? Hire an outside agency? Recruit a UX expert?McKay believes it should start with training, including UX training for developers:

“

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 7 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

As someone in the training business, naturally, I think that training teams in UX goes along, long way. Even though there’s a lot of companies trying to get serious about UIdesign, the reality is that their design staff is relatively sparse. So you might have ateam of a hundred developers, and you might have a usability team of five people.

It’s very difficult for a team of five UX professionals to scale to a hundred people. It’sjust really hard to do. So a lot of my best customers are recognizing this, and they’rehaving me train their teams throughout the world. I think developers are more likely toembrace the idea of a great user experience if they understand why it’s important, andhow to do it in a very objective way.

McKay doesn’t think it’s realistic to hire the number of designers needed to handle all theelements of good UX. But he does think that rolling out UX training, and developing a set ofguidelines around that training, is viable. With this approach, design is built into the developmentprocess, experts are freed up to have the most impact, and good design can scale:

If everybody on the team knows how to write a good error message, a designerdoesn’t have to deal with that. It’s not realistic to have a designer, or even a writer,design every single error message, but if we have a good set of guidelines, and wehave people on board with what we’re trying to do, we can scale that a whole lot moreefficiently.

So that’s kind of the thing that I see my customers wanting to do: get their teams toadopt more design thinking in their process, embrace it rather than oppose it, andknow enough so that we can scale our very limited scarce resources a whole lot moreefficiently.

That’s a good note to wrap on. I hope you’ve enjoyed this two part series – I’ll return to UX topicsin the future, so please drop me a line if you’ve seen something in the field worth covering.

Here’s the embedded version of my UX podcast with McKay:

“

“

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 8 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

Busting the omnichannel - enterprise hacks and chatsWhy UX matters - live from Atlanta with Everett McKay

00:00 00:00

!" #

(You can download the podcast also, on my Busting the Omnichannel page)

This article is part of a ongoing series I am writing on Enterprise UX and the highs and lows ofmobile app design.

Want a free weekly digest?Signup today for free to receive the best of diginomica's content

And don’t worry, we hate spam too! You can unsubscribe at anytime.

First Name

Last Name

Enter your email

Get the Good Stuff

Image credits: Slides and book excerpts from UI is Communication are used with the expresspermission of Everett McKay, all rights reserved. McKay photo by Jon Reed. Feature image: keep itsimple © Marek – Fotolia.com.

Disclosure: I have no financial ties to Everett McKay or UX Design Edge, and I funded the trip toAtlanta for family reasons. McKay provided me with a complementary one day attendance to hisclass for the purposes of this article content.

Updated with a few clarifications on March 23, 11:29 am.

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 9 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

Bio Twitter LinkedIn Latest Posts

84 Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Google+

Jon ReedJon Reed has been involved in enterprise communities since 1995, including timespent building ERP recruiting and training firms. These days, Jon is a rovingblogger/analyst, and also counsels vendors and startups on go-to-market strategy.He is a diginomica co-founder, Enterprise Irregular, and purveyor of multi-mediacontent. Jon is an advocate for media over marketing; he sees diginomica as achance to disrupt tech media, with the BS-weary enterprise reader in mind.

Related Stories

Enterprise UX is communication - beyond UX clichés with Everett McKay

Inside the Enterprise UX revolution - a day at Infor's Hook & Loop

Shares

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 10 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

How independent advisors can change project outcomes - with Frank Scavo

Enterprise hits and misses - holiday highs and lows edition

Is the enterprise user experience overhyped?

Explore Diginomica

Virgin Media: A good example of how NOT to do customer management

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 11 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

Powered by

Interview: Transport for London's head of CX on leading the world in payments innovation

Plex - the modern face of manufacturing software

I am so getting a Tesla Model 3...the filling in the S3X portfolio

Payments processing got a new twist with Square Cash and $Cashtags

Filed Under: Event reports, Frictionless enterprise, Innovation

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 12 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

Hank says:March 23, 2015 at 2:46 pmThis is a really great piece, Jon. I love all the advice and commentary. A couple of added

thoughts:* The persona guidance is golden. Knowing that a persona likes hockey and indiemusic does nothing to help me design (if it was a person, I might have more to talk about withthem, but not a persona), but knowing that the persona frequently multi-tasks and needs helpto make sure he/she doesn’t lose context when switching activities is great for designers.*Simple is complex, but it is about choices.* Much of the advice could apply very effectively tosome of my passions–messaging and differentiation.* Years ago, and I always remember this,Ronni Marshak (with Patricia Seybold Group), suggested that “intuitive” interfaces would not begood enough. Why? Because intuitive means you can figure it out. For most functions, thegoal should be “obvious interfaces”—nothing to figure out, it is obvious what to do. Moreadvanced stuff could be intuitive (i.e. detail on demand things), but obvious is better.This is amust read for pretty much anyone involved in technology. Thanks for sharing.Hank

Log in to Reply

Sign In With LinkedIn

Sign In With Twitter

Sign In With Facebook

Sign In With Google

Leave a ReplyYou must be logged in to post a comment.

Username

Password

Remember Me

LOG IN

or

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 13 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

Jon Reed says:March 23, 2015 at 3:08 pmThanks Hank – McKay had a ton of good insights that pushed my own UX thinking –

nice combo of working for a large company (Microsoft) and then testing those principlesout in the field independently after leaving. McKay had more content on the tradeoffs ofsimplicity that I didn’t include here, but he pointed out that every design choice has atradeoff. That includes “simplicity” which is idealized to the point of being almost useless.

But, it can be a powerful principle if the tradeoffs are understood in the context of thepersonas/roles being designed for. One thing that came out in my Infor piece was that personas are ideally developedthrough both interviews and on-site observations. Too often, the “personas” are notgrounded in the specifics of what that particular user does on the job.

No amount of “hobbies” to humanize the persona can make up for the ignorance oflacking intimate knowledge of how they do their jobs and how they use the software inquestion (or want to use it). Strong ;points on intuition – that was something I covered more directly in part one,Enterprise UX is Communication.

– Jon

Log in to Reply

Premier Partner Newsfeed

“Speeding up the innovationcycle with SaaS” by SteveMiranda

Taking a Proactive Approach ToCustomer Retention

Infor Expands Suites forFederal Agencies

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 14 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

Advertising Insights: Mobile andRetail Together, eCommerceAcross Devices, and Video Ads

The force is strong in Australia

Personal Experience – the userinterface

Top SEO KPIs to Track forEcommerce Success

Looking Forward: The Next 10Years with Finance in the Cloud

What’s Next: Manufacturing'sResurgence

An Expert Conversation withGlobal Support Guru CraigMackereth

SAP HANA 4 IoT Post-EventUpdates

Partner Newsfeeds

The Coupa Top 5: Earning trustand diving deeper into data

Acumatica Partner ProgramAwarded Top 5-Star CRN RatingFor Another Year

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 15 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

The Rise of the New Marketer:The Economist’s Findings onKey Trends

Our value

Recent Conversations

Vincent on Is the ‘sharing economy’, in its current form,just a capitalist con?

Den Howlett on Silicon Valley sexism on trial, with topfirms in the firing line

Michael on Debunking the 5 myths of personalization:Part 1

Jon Reed on Enterprise UX essentials – the virtues andperils of simplicity

Hank on Enterprise UX essentials – the virtues and perilsof simplicity

Events Calendar

MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT SUN« MAR 2015 »

23 24 25 26 27 28 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica

Page 16 of 16http://diginomica.com/2015/03/20/enterprise-ux-essentials-virtues-perils-simplicity/

WED

25

HR Tech Europe – LondonHR Tech Europe – London

March 24 @ 7:45 am - March 25 @ 5:00 pm

26 27 28 29

30 31 1 2 3 4 5

Affiliate Partners

Categories

Select Category

Copyright diginomica Ltd 2013-15, Created under Creative Commons License, some rights reserved

23 24 25