The word “Enterprise” makes me feel boredom immediately. In addition I wouldn’t classify my day-to-day work as having much to do with UX. But one way or another I ended up attending EUX this year. I was pleasantly surprised.

I attended with a few teammates from HPE who were in the same boat as I. We quickly discovered that we were the only software engineers at the conference which gave us an easy conversation starter with the “UXers” who made up the majority of the people attending.

Wednesday was the workshop, followed by a single lecture track on Thursday and Friday.

Design Systems

The workshop was titled Scaled Design Systems. Think Material Design. Certainly useful but rather too impractical for my purpose. My key takeaway was that design systems are a crucial resource of aligning a large number of products and are worth developing.

Lectures

The lectures on the other hand were surprisingly refreshing. The single track was broker down to four themes:

1. Build - primarily talked to the power of UX and the responsibility that comes with it.
2. Communicate - the superpowers of UX can and should be applied to wider contexts for social good.
3. Invest - it makes sense for organizations to invest in UX because it pays. How to convince others.
4. Scale - Scaling an organization causes dehumanization. This can be overcome by paying attention to misfits and encouraging cross-talk in the organization.

One example that stands out to illustrate the importance of good UX is the US veteran government portal which went from a malfunctioning waste of the users’ time to a usable service (https://www.vets.gov/) which likely saved lives through prompt medical help signup.

The closing keynote by Ricahrd Buchanan was particularly abstract and interesting to me. He spoke about a new type of design arising in companies such as Salesforce and Uber. He dubbed it Dialectic Design (as opposed to Graphic, Industrial and UX Design) - which to me roughly meant design of conversations which enable change to occur. Tied to the concept were intuition/creativity - the unique human ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated and opposite concepts, which is enabled by a more human connection between the organization and its users.

Logistics and entertainment

We were served tasty food, has a great after/after after parties. Folks were welcoming and talkative.

Conclusion

UX appears to be playing an increasingly important role in our digital world but good UX is a struggle for most enterprises. It’s hard to do at scale. Design Thinking can be applied broadly to many domains and is about problem solving and moving forward from the situation you find yourself in. Enterprises probably feel boring because of the scale at which they operate and the serverance of human connection which that scale brings. At the same time enterprises hold a great deal of power to move the world because of such scale. Transforming enterprises through good UX can make a large impact.