Okay, my home office location in Foursquare is meant to be a joke, but I really *do* do a lot of work on back office apps. And how do I love them? I’m about to count the ways for you.
1. There’s Lots of ‘Em
In truth, loads more of the work of the First World gets done through back office applications than through B2C or B2B platforms. So I love back office apps because there are more of them. More work for me that you don’t want to do. Yay.
2. They’re Important
These apps are crucial. Mutual funds get priced through them, health benefits get assigned and administered, trains run on time through them, people pay their vendors with them, or figure out energy rates – for instance. What this means is my work, though not glorious, is important. Their dependability is mission-critical, and failure can have bad consequences – and I love the discipline that that imposes on me in using my craft.
3. They’re Easier to Make Significantly Better, Fast
They get no love, and therefore all my love wells up to take care of these poor shoeless cobbler’s kids. My goal as a UXer is to make people’s lives better, and even with the usual strict technical constraints associated with back office apps, making these apps better is frequently like shooting fish in a barrel. Fixing the size of targets, aligning labels with fields, putting controls in better proximity to instructions or data go a long way in improving the usability of these apps. Bamm! – now the workflow is more efficient.
4. I am Soooooo Not My User
These are not retail users. They’ve cut their way through a landscape of what appears to us as mounds of undifferentiated data; their jobs depend on that skill. Terms and labels that are as opaque as coal to you and me are perfectly transparent to them. So it’s a good idea to refrain from putting labels in the vernacular until you know what they understand, how they understand it and what they need it for.
Many times, users are in the system all day, tabbing and typing frantically: you don’t want to slow them down with the sort of hand-holding you’d provide for a retail customer. Ease of learning takes a back seat to efficiency of use; don’t break up the flow or add instructions unless you’re sure it’s needed.
Engagement is not the primary aim; facilitation is. Your user normally does not have a choice about what they’re given to use, anyway. Make the system get out of the way to let them do their jobs – that’s what will delight these users.
5. More Access to Captive Users
But, because they *are* a captive audience, designers usually have great access to them. Recruiting for research is easier, and feedback from users can be obtained more frequently throughout the design process. This is really important because you are sooooo not them (see #4 above.)
6. Juicy Design Problems Can Arise
Their data problems are usually more complex and interesting. I recently had a project where the client wanted me to flip the axis on the way users interacted with some data. Users had been able to choose several of 100 things and assign several of 750 things to them. The request (later pulled out of scope) was to allow them to also choose several of the 750 things and assign them to several of the 100 things. Users’ familiarity with the 750 things was low; but if a new item was added to this pool of data, users would be able to more easily pick out the new items and assign them to the relevant 100 than the other way around. Both routes into the task were necessary.
Figured out how to map that, yet? See, to me, that’s an interesting design problem.
Conclusion
So these are the main reasons why Crappy Back Office Apps R Us: there’s more work that’s important to do, it’s easy to make a positive impact, you’ll meet people you never dreamed existed who are doing jobs you never thought about, and you’re likely to encounter some interesting challenges. So though they may not win me any design awards or other acclaim, I’m happy to help get my clients’ teams off the green screens and into something that gives them more job satisfaction while it cuts my clients’ costs.
From the HQ of Crappy-Back-Office-Apps-R-Us, I’m signing out…
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I am sooo with you. Working on a back-office app now (very big one). CMS for a video streaming company (at least that’s what they want to be). Definitely has juicy problems, too. Pricing schemes, asset life-cycles, video-on-demand vs. live channel streams, etc. Mmmm hmmmm!
The other thing I love about (maybe not so crappy) back-office apps is that no one else can figure them out. You have to have a business analyst, lots of imagination, lots of brainstorming and role-playing, but the payoff is so huge when an employee says they can use it without a ton of training.
Oh, yeah, really – it’s the volume of data plus the variety of it that make back office apps so much more interesting to me than working on your average marketing site. All of the data is on steroids – and you’d better make sure you’re taking supplements too, to keep up with them.
Perversely thrilling.
Great post, Joan–and I agree 100%. Often these projects are pitched to me as being ‘massive and massively boring’, but I rarely find them to be so. As David said: The payoff in solving and improving these systems can be hugely rewarding. If an employee has to spend 8 hours per day using an application that frustrates them and that they hate their quality of life definitely suffers. Creating innovative UI and new products is definitely cool–but I think making the ones that drive our world run more efficiently is even cooler
Related: a great article on UX Magazine in praise of constraints: http://uxmag.com/design/thinking-inside-a-smaller-box
Thanks for a fun article with some excellent points. I’m willing to bet there will be a bunch of new BO (pun intended) apps in the utility industry as the smart grid feeds them more, better, faster data. I don’t know who’s going to be developing those apps, but like you I’d love to jump on that ride, find the handles, and hang on tight!