- During our Q&A session at the August virtual conference,
Anna from the US asked about up and coming trends
in the enterprise software design sector.
Jakob Nielsen shared his thoughts on leveraging large,
higher-resolution screens and more.
- First of all, I think we're about to have
the UX revolution hit that space, which is long overdue.
You know, enterprise software is still
kind of quite terrible in most cases,
partly because I think that inside the company
the thinking is well, customers don't see that.
So it doesn't matter quite how it's designed
but that's partly based on that,
I would say erroneous thinking
that the sign is making things pretty.
First of all, even for employees,
they still like to have things that are nice
and you want to improve employee satisfaction,
and that means employee retention
also even employee productivity
because like happy people, you know, work better.
But as we know, UX is much more than just like how it looks.
And so it also how it's more important like , how it works.
And that has huge impact on productivity.
And also on people's ability to perform kind of,
like you might say advanced tasks
and that's what computers are still holding us back
to a, quite a great extent.
And people are still wasting a lot of time
on clunky internal tools
and the protudity advances in business in the future
will be driven much, much more by software
and by software design than
by the traditional kind of improving the manufacturing flow.
But there's still improving to be head
of course, improving physical things as well.
But for the knowledge workers
are who generates the majority of the value
these days and our productivity and that's people like us.
So our productivity could still increase dramatically
if we got better tools and you wouldn't go
and take, you know, a mechanic
and just only give them like one big clunky hammer
and say, that's your only tool to fix all the machines.
You give them a specialized tools
for what they're going to do,
and the same should be true here.
So I think that's what enterprise will do.
There'll be a lot, I think, much more emphasis also
on collaboration tools, not just no individual one use
of tools, but collaboration tools, of course
especially now where a lot of people are working from home
and it's remote collaboration, then software support
for collaboration becomes even more crucial
but this is a longer term issue anyway.
So collaboration tools are still extremely primitive
and so, software for sure, but even also things
like hardware, like getting people color
the virtual whiteboards for their home offices
and barriers other things.
So I think a lot of emphasis of this collaboration,
a lot of emphasis on supporting knowledge workers
in advanced decision-making,
and making sense of large amounts of data.
This is probably circling back to the big screens.
That's where that actually really does help
because bigger screens really are better
for almost any knowledge work.
I mean, your eyes can just move so fast
over the screen, much faster, any scrolling
and you can take in and kind of accumulate information
so much better by seeing it on a big screen.
And that's why right now we see a lot of,
I think really terrible under utilization
of the big screens, for designs that are more optimized
towards mobilization and small screens,
and then they'll say, Oh, well just take that design,
and I scale it up and make it 10, 20 times bigger,
but that's not how you get a lot of advanced
knowledge worker productivity out of them
by taking small things and making them 20 times bigger.
You've got two different for bigger screens
but I mean, buying a big screen is probably one
of the best investments that company can make
and not as worthy of productivity,
but then also designing for the big screen as well.
And you see some companies are doing that for sure.
I mean, Bloomberg is an example of that.
It's an American company that does financial analyst
kind of stock trader type support systems.
So they really had like two big monitors.
That's what they designed for their main users.
Like you have two gigantic margins next to each other
and those guys can kind of watch the stock market
in real time and have advanced tools for that.
But there's so many other jobs where we don't do that
and where people sit and work through very clunky screens
and flows that take into this time.
I mean, if any of you, when you go to
like the doctor's office and example,
you see this extremely highly paid person sitting there
working with so primitive screens, it's just ridiculous.
Waste of money that we are paying for,
but the same is true for any business, actually
that the tools that people use are so enormously premised.
So I think that, that's my biggest longterm trend is really
that I think the will be more emphasis
on a UX and enterprise software.
A lot of that emphasis is going to be
on kind of more powerful tools,
both for individual use and analysis and data kind of
absorption and also for collaboration.
So that's kind of a number of trends
that are all kind of in that bigger picture
of finally get some good software
inside the companies as well.