IT professionals need to become more intimately engaged with user experience (UX) designers -- the end result is software that is much more appealing, more conducive to productivity, and less likely to become shelfware. Corporate end-users would like to see the easy-to-navigate, click-and-done interfaces they see as consumers at work as well. But workplace solutions are often clunky, frustrating, and difficult to navigate.
While bringing development and UX design groups together is easier pontificated than done, such a meeting of the minds is taking place at one of the world's largest tech providers. In a recent post[1], Tricia Fejfar, director of user experience with Microsoft's Core Services Engineering and Operations (internal IT) unit, describes how it was done.
Fejfar, formerly a design manager for Microsoft Office, accomplished this by forming a UX Studio at scale inside Microsoft's IT department. The tech giant obviously knew a thing or two about UX design for its products, and it was time to apply those same principles to its own internal users. The initiative received plenty of support from the top -- Microsoft's internal IT unit was reorganizing, and recognized that corporate end-users needed the same positive experiences with software that customer end-users would expect. Microsoft employees were "using tools that weren't always seamless or accessible to our diverse teams around the world," Fejfar explains. "Our evolving workforce deserved better than what they were getting."
Enter UX design thinking. The challenge for Microsoft, as it is for most organizations, is while IT as a Service[2] has been the emphasis in recent years, "UX professionals aren't usually an integral part of IT departments," says Fejfar. "One or two UXers might work throughout the various groups, but you don't typically find