Understanding target audience is the most essential step in any design process and it becomes even more crucial when it comes to designing applications for Enterprise users for mobile devices. Some of the key aspects to consider during user profiling apart from the regular ethnographic research study are:
- Work culture
- Mobile usage
- Business need
- Life cycle
Work Culture
Work culture refers to nature of work of an Enterprise user; whether they are all day busy in a meeting, all day out in the site or working from home or at office.
We also need to get information about users in the organization like do they work as independent contributor or manager where people are reporting to them and so on.
This basically gives an overview of the working style, work environment and also the typical corporate etiquettes.
Mobile Usage
This exercise would help us to identify the Enterprise user’s most important and frequently performed task on mobile device for personal as well as business purpose. It also helps us to gather information about their likes and dislikes about mobile devices and applications.
Most of the times users are forced to do a particular task in a particular fashion due to business need, but there could be alternative solutions which might help users to perform their task very easily. This exercise brings out such existing usage patterns which does not match users mental model.
Business Need
The business need would demand that Enterprise user gets connected to the Enterprise Application via mobile devices while travelling. This helps us to understand what kind of data and information users look for when they are travelling and away from office which will help them to perform their day to day business activities.
Gathering business requirement for Enterprise application could be achieved during this session like do’s and don’ts in an application or a wish list from the users. Competitive analysis would also be an outcome of this exercise, where in users might definitely want to compare their experience with various devices and applications available in the industry.
Life Cycle
This is one of the key aspects in the entire user profiling session, because design solutions should adapt to Enterprise user’s life cycle and increase their task completion success rate.
This would reveal most of the designers query like
- How a typical user’s day look like?
- How busy they are?
- What is the usage of laptop vs. mobile devices?
- When do they prefer using each of the devices? and
- What is the most frequently done task
Empathy is a crucial lifeskill and even more valuable in designing UX for applications. We would highly encourage the UX designers working on Enterprise applications to spend time in understanding the domain, the business, and the motivations for the user roles that they are solving for.
