Bintegra is an IT company that helps companies in the Energy, Telco, and other industries to design and implement digital enterprise B2B applications. Also, we integrate and automate business processes in the areas of CRM, Self-care Portals, Mobile & Digital Marketing and Social Media.
But whether we work in energy, information, or economy sector, at Bintegra we strongly believe that User Experience – UX for enterprise applications matters. Alben LauraLee was the first to mention the term UX in the context of interactive products and defined it as: “… how people feel when they take the product in their hands, how well they understand how it works, how they feel when they use it, how well it serves its purpose, and how well it fits into the overall context in which they use it”.
Enterprise UX refers to the design of business products and is no regular UX. The key differences between UX design for enterprise applications and consumer applications are:
- Choice. In companies, the applications are chosen by the management and the end users (employees) don’t have a say in the decision. The look, feel and purpose of the application is defined by the management. On the other hand, regular consumers have freedom of choice and buy their own applications.
- Scope. Enterprise applications are much more complex than consumer applications and have many more functionalities. In addition, they are often tailored for people working in specific roles.
- Specific business domain. Applications are made for a specific business domain and are solving specific business process in a specific context.
In our experience, the UX design of enterprise applications is generally lacking and lagging far behind that of consumer applications. The problem we are facing is that many companies still do not see the connection between a better user experience and higher profits. The reality is that business users expect the same quality of experience as consumer products.
A perfect example of the business value of enterprise UX is given below:
Imagine that you optimize the application user experience so that what was once a 10-minute task is now a 5-minute task. You have increased an employee’s’ productivity by 100%. If your company has 100 employees that use the application who have an average salary of 1.613 EUR – gross (Source: http://www.stat.si), you could either release or re-assign those employees on other activities with a savings of almost 1.000.000 EUR/year (50 employees x 1.613 EUR x 12 months).
Needless to say, at Bintegra we are firmly convinced, that, by investing in UX, we increase productivity in customers that use our applications, and we decrease training hours, support and maintenance costs.
