“One of the things that is hardest to deal with is the smugness in companies that only the idiot falls for a phishing email and that’s completely incorrect because we can push it to the point where we can get 100% of people to click on an email. There’s no doubt that everybody is susceptible to this. It’s something you have to be aware of all the time and it’s something that has to be confidently reinforced on an ongoing basis.”
According to Richard O’Brien, technical director with Triangle Computer Services, the move towards making the user experience more consumer-like is driven in part by the simultaneous move towards mobility.
A simple and clean layout, a consistent interface and adaptability were the most satisfactory design elements chosen by respondents. Making relevant information easily accessible, automation or actions based on events, and a customisable user interface based on user actions were also preferred design elements, Scott Matteson, TechPro Research
Mobility driver
“A growing number of companies want to make their line of business applications available on mobile devices and with that has come a move towards simplifying the user experience. In addition, many of these enterprise level mobile applications take their design and usability queues from the likes of Google and Outlook Mail, Facebook and other consumer-friendly online services,” he said.
“Users are really looking for that type of service from their internal IT provider and they’re much less interested in desktop operating systems and in being tied to a particular type of device. They want to consume their internal IT on the go, understanding that there’s a need for the business to be aware of the context within which they’re operating so that security can be applied appropriately.”
Despite this, they still want to be able to self-manage and self-provision applications as they need them and to get access to data as they need it.
“The consumerisation of IT is pretty much a universal theme at this stage, and there are few aspects of enterprise IT that are unaffected by it at least at some level. The idea is increasingly that as an employee, you should be able to go to an app store and self-provision,” said O’Brien.
“You might have an approval process to go through but there are benefits for the organisation because you have much more granular control over licencing. By definition the people who self-provision are those who need the application at that point in time and you can revoke that provision at any point internally and re-provision that licence to somebody else.”
Consumer experience
Meanwhile, recent research suggests that while enterprise software is growing in popularity among companies, consumer software provides a better user experience. The research, published by ZDNet, stated that 44% of the 183 companies surveyed said that enterprise software was either somewhat or significantly worse to use than consumer software.
“A simple and clean layout, a consistent interface and adaptability were the most satisfactory design elements chosen by respondents. Making relevant information easily accessible, automation or actions based on events, and a customisable user interface based on user actions were also preferred design elements,” said Scott Matteson of TechPro Research (no affiliation), the author of the research “The Evolution of Enterprise Software UX”.
Almost three quarters (73%) of those surveyed also felt that the enterprise software they use is missing features or components which user input could have pointed to as useful in advance. Some of the frustrations experienced using enterprise software include a lack of intuitiveness, complexity, clunky or slow interfaces and missing features.
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