Some recent workshop sessions and user (learner?) research with a client have made me wonder about a possible wrinkle on the smooth baize of UX thinking in the corporate world. In the wild public world of product design and delivery, we are free to design our best solution to user challenges and make it available. We do have to offer that product in the messy and compromised digital world we inhabit and fight like crazy to win attention and draw traffic/downloads/sign ups. Other than that struggle we can carve a purposeful proposition and make the most of it. Where similar or related services exist, a distribution deal or conversation might be available to mutual benefit.
In the corporate world, the landscape tends to be filled with larger less well defined features. Often these phenomena (for they are rarely products or tools as a user would recognise them) mark a departmental territory and purpose, rather than a potential problem solved for a user. Often too, they carry the purpose of a system and a process designed for the benefit of the organisation and not pointed at resolving a user need. An LMS, an intranet or a finance system, in its many and varied incarnations, often appear in this form. As a user we have to negotiate them, navigate through them and hope for survival at the other end.
From a users point of view their relationship to your own product may not be clear. The same language, labelling and content may well appear on them. If you are in the learning game then the boundaries could well be blurred. User guides, comms campaign material, policy documents and the like can rightly be the answer to a “finding something out” question. The product they are available in may not be discernible or of interest to your user. This presents a tricky challenge.
A proper investigation of user epxerience needs to account for the whole experience of a system or product. This needs to include the possible, or likely, confusion of arriving at your carefully crafted content through the confusing boulders around it. That is part of the epxerience of fulfilling a learning need. It is part of the whole user epxerience and should not be ignored.
Lobbying the owners of these other products to change them can be a complex and wearing experience in some organisations. Where it is simple and close at hand, it may still not be a priority for resource or time. Do give it a try though. I doubt that the owners of these services have much genuine UX data to hand or are aware of possible and real confusion. Failing that, stick closely and clearly to what you are about.
One option we always have is to make our own services and products crystal clear in their purpose form the very fast click or swipe. Define that purpose and stick closely to it in all iterations. Even in muddy and ugly surroundings, your users will respect you for the clarity you show them. They will know, quickly and clearly, what to expect.
The mess around our products and content is part of the reality of the UX and it is our responsibility to respond to it, irritating though that may be.
We’ve been struggling with the same problem, I think: I describe it as trying to drill horizontally across the organisational verticals. That is to say, when you describe a solution that works for an employee (the UX) it cuts across many ‘territories’: for example a leadership app might seek to serve guidance on a mobile device in areas such as safety or HR policy. In creating the platform and simplifying the content, one cuts across intranet, safety, legal and HR territories in a single stroke – whilst simultaneously departing the narrowly defined ‘learning’ remit. The reaction is as if you have laid a motorway through their back garden. But I am sure you are right; UX is the highway to productivity.