Employees are people too: improving web-based user experience in the workplace

Andrew Sweany, Usability Consultant, Information Technology Services, Monash University, VIC, 3800.
Email: andrew.sweany@its.monash.edu.au

Keywords

web application, IT, user experience, usability, 3rd party

Abstract

The main purpose of Information Technology (IT) in the workplace is to empower the enterprise’s most important resources – employees. Over the years, web technologies have undoubtedly improved operational efficiency across all types of businesses. A consistent challenge for IT organizations is how to deploy and maintain valuable solutions in a cost-effective manner, leading to the common ‘build or buy’ decision. To address this challenge many IT departments are increasingly purchasing 3rd party applications to minimize or eliminate custom design and development.

The risk of this approach is that decisions regarding which capabilities to deploy and how to deploy them will be based too heavily on technical factors and high-level business need without fully understanding the resulting impact(s) to users. IT departments can technically deliver a capability flawlessly, but if the user’s experience with the solution is poor, benefits will at best be reduced and in the worst case, offset entirely. At the project level, a variety of user centered design (UCD) activities should be performed to allow user considerations to be balanced with technical and business factors.

At the design level, this paper reviews challenges unique to web-based applications and ways to avoid these becoming user experience issues for employees. As publicly facing web applications continue to improve, IT departments will be pressured to provide tools with a comparable level of user experience to employees.