If you’ve checked out our user experience (UX) resources page, you might know the importance of UX and how to spot apps that need some UX love. But how does UX get to the point where it needs a serious refresh? If we understand how UX gets bad in the first place, we’ll be better equipped to bring a less-than-stellar UX up to all-star status.
The problem with generic UX.
We’ll start with the standard UX in your customer relationship management (CRM) software. In moments of frustration, it can seem like the applications you purchased to make your sales or customer service teams successful are working against you. But your enterprise software isn’t trying to trip you up, it just has generic UX.
Because the software needs to be accessible to businesspeople across industries, performing all kinds of different functions, it has to appeal to a broad range of business needs. But your business isn’t generic. You have unique needs because you do things a certain way. It’s what sets you apart, and it’s why your customers choose you over your competitors.
The next step.
Once you’ve realized you have generic UX, customize it, but this is where things get complicated.You hire developers or add more tasks to the ones you have on staff, to code custom tweaks to your off-the-shelf software.
You consult with the users on what they’re looking for, write out a long list of requirements for the developers, and wait while they code the customizations. But the solution takes a year and a half to develop (or longer, depending on how much you had to adjust requirements along the way).
The wait might be worth it, if the project delivered great value. But more often than not, by the time the new product is rolled out, user needs have changed so much that it’s practically obsolete. Or if it does work, it’s only for a select number of users, at the expense of the majority. Suddenly, you hear grumbling from users again.
After all that work, you’re back at square one, with bad UX. That process, repeated again and again, is discouraging. So, you feel compelled to adopt a band-aid approach, coding quick fixes for user issues or delaying maintenance, rather than attempting another expensive, time-consuming UX overhaul.
But adding band-aid after band-aid creates a fragmented system that can cause security issues and system outages down the line. By the time you’re ready to try another UX redesign, you’ve got a mountain of code to scale. Luckily, there’s hope.
Now that we know the story of how our UX gets stuck, we have a better idea of how to break free. And that’s just what we talk about in our free eBook, Drive CRM success through effective user experience. Download it today and learn how to conquer your UX project fast, and cost-effectively.
