Michael Gould: Bringing consumer grade design to an enterprise platform

Michael Gould was talking about design on an enterprise platform at DotYork, these are my notes from his talk.

Quota planning is deciding which customers sales reps are allocated to and what their targets are. Starts two months before the period starts - quota drives the behaviour of the sales reps. Used to be run on spreadsheets and took five months to get through the cycle leaving three months uncovered.

Enterprise software tries to solve complex problems, providing first class user experience can be a significant differentiator and allow an individual solution to stand out.

Users are often familiar with desktop applications - like Excel. This has local data so can be very fast to respond. Web needs work to match the UI responsiveness of native.

Often large data volumes, have to consider the volume of data you are interacting with and where you are handling it - client or server.

Having a UI/UX designer embedded with every team brings that focus to everything you are doing at a low level.

Can be hard to actually get to end users who are hands on with the software in a corporate setting - they normally have absolutely no say in the software selection process.

In order to deliver products at this scale you need innovative engineering teams to solve technical problems. You have to live with technology decisions for a long time.