UX for Business

Internal Tools

Captive Users

We have already seen mistakes that happen because businesses forget that users can leave. Now let’s look at a group of users who can’t leave: employees.

Companies often need to make software and apps to manage their own work. Employees must use those tools to do their job. That gives us some opportunities that seem like luxuries compared to normal users.

We can train employees, so we can design things that might be hard to use the first time. We don’t need to worry about engagement or loyalty because employees have no choice. And they aren’t allowed to choose another tool. No more worrying about whether they choose to buy!

Those are all dangerous opportunities. We might fix usability problems with more training, skip our user research because we don’t have to make the users happy, and make unnecessary features because complexity won’t hurt our user numbers.

Understand What Makes Money, Not Just User Requests

This principle is true for every product or service you design, but when you don’t have external users, it becomes critical: understand the problems you are solving, not just the wish list from users. The difference with internal tools is the balance of business value and user value: tip it further toward the business.

When you diagnose ...