Ok, let’s face it, enterprise applications are typically associated with unattractive, hard to learn, and inefficient user experience (UX) designs. But, as you may be aware, there is a growing number of enterprise software startups that are getting a lot of attention for having enterprise apps with very good UX designs (Box, Workday, Salesforce.com, etc…). They are quickly becoming competitors to the legacy enterprise software companies (Oracle, SAP, HP, IBM, etc…). So, why are these well established legacy enterprise software companies getting leapfrogged by these startups when it comes to UX design? Why aren’t these larger companies simply redesigning the UX for their enterprise apps… because it’s really not that simple.
Here are three key reasons why legacy enterprise applications tend to have crummy UX designs. These reasons also explain why UX design improvements aren’t going to happen overnight for these companies. UX design is finally recognized as a key factor in the overall success of software applications and startup enterprise software companies currently have an advantage when it comes this. Now it’s up to the legacy enterprise software companies to catch up and redesign their apps to compete with these new up and comers.
1. Originally Designed by Engineers: To begin with we need to understand why so many legacy enterprise apps have very poor UX designs in the first place. The primary reason is that they were originally designed by engineers who felt that they understood how the app they designed worked and therefore they assumed that the user could figure it out. Then over time different engineers added more and more new features with their own designs to a product that already had a bad UX design. Even worse, engineers not only designed the apps, but they also wrote the app content, including the instructions. This resulted in inconsistent and poorly designed apps with instructions written to be understood by engineers. Engineers have had “ownership” of these apps since inception and in many cases they are reluctant to allow a designer to come and change what they’ve created.
Finally the larger legacy enterprise software companies are starting to recognize the value of UX design and it’s slowly becoming a standard part of their software development processes. However the new enterprise software startups are creating their apps incorporating UX design from inception. They were designed by UX professionals who knew how to create software products to be used by their intended audience, they weren’t designed by the engineers who programmed them. The new apps started with the advantage of being modern looking, easy to learn and instantly appealing to customers. The enterprise software startups proved that enterprise apps don’t need to be ugly, hard to learn, and cumbersome to use.
2. Extremely large suites of apps: The largest enterprise app companies offer customers full service end to end enterprise technology solutions, presented in suites of applications that each address unique business or IT requirements, a variety of software platforms, and a variety of target audiences. Even though these application suites are integrated at a data and/or technical level, each app in these suites has been created and is supported by their own engineering, marketing and sales teams. The apps have also been designed by a variety of engineers from different departments and disciplines, so there is little to no consistency within the apps, let alone between the different apps. Having all these apps integrated and working together provides tremendous value to the companies who use them and it’s also the reason they are willing to pay millions of dollars to purchase and maintain them. Unfortunately, poor UX design is keeping the legacy app customers from receiving the full potential of these integrated enterprise solutions which makes them vulnerable to new and potentially better enterprise solutions.
Most of the startup companies offer just one, or a small number of these enterprise apps, and they can’t provide the fully integrated business solutions required by large enterprise customers. But, these new apps were all originally designed as cloud-based giving them the benefit of easily adapting to changes in their app offerings. The best example of this is SalesForce.com. They started as a CRM app and have grown to offer a customer service app, a social marketing app, and a platform and market place for 3rd parties to create and offer additional enterprise apps. SalesForce.com is already used by hundreds of large enterprise companies and thousands of smaller businesses.
3. Legacy Users: Most of these enterprise apps also have customers who have been using them for many years, sometimes decades. Each time an app UX design gets updated there are customers who complain, sometimes bitterly. Customers want updates, but most don’t want the costs associated with any new UX design changes, especially the time it takes to learn the new version. The users already spent time learning how to use the enterprise apps and they tend to have their preferred ways of using them. The companies have spent thousands, if not millions, of dollars to train their employees. People don’t like change, especially in things that they’ve used for years, spent countless hours learning, and invested millions of dollars supporting.
The new enterprise apps tend to have very good UX designs, so they are easy to learn and use. However, the advantage for Legacy application companies is that most of these newer and smaller apps aren’t very complex. Legacy apps tend to have features their customers have come to depend upon. Many of the legacy customers have directly influenced the features that are in the apps, so they are going to be very reluctant to change to any product that offers fewer features. But, these features can eventually be added to the new apps, providing an opportunity for them to eventually win over these customers.
Legacy enterprise apps weren’t created overnight and fortunately they also aren’t going away overnight either. Now UX design is becoming part of the product development cycle at these companies and even though the changes to the UX designs are a huge project, the process of updating them has begun. I’ll explain in upcoming blogs why the legacy enterprise app companies do stand a really good chance of competing against these startups… in the long run.
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