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10 Years of Enterprise UX: Reflecting on the community and the practice
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Summary
Join us for a free, live Zoom discussion with some of the original conference hosts and speakers—Uday Gajendar, Lada Gorlenko, Dave Malouf, Lou Rosenfeld, and Dan Willis. We’ll dig into the history and future of enterprise UX—both the conference and, more importantly, an oddly undersung practice whose importance keeps growing.
We'll share behind-the-scenes stories, lessons that stuck, and maybe a few “what was Lou thinking?” moments.
Key Insights
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Enterprise UX conferences emerged to fill a community gap for designers facing complex, large-scale business problems often ignored by standard UX events.
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Storytelling sessions allowed practitioners to share impactful five-minute personal experiences, creating emotional resonance and learning.
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Silos persist as a major obstacle in enterprise UX, existing both as organizational structures and ingrained cultural mindsets.
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Alignment across multiple business units and functions remains challenging, often complicated by funding models and power dynamics.
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Complexity in enterprise UX is not just technological but also cultural, requiring designers to engage with organizational politics and relationships.
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IBM’s success came from teaching designers business language, embedding domain expertise, and deploying code-based design systems for scale.
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Enterprise UX is less about superficial fixes and more about deep systemic changes, including strategy, culture, and consistent language.
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Civic tech represents an extreme form of enterprise UX focused on fixing broken government systems, emphasizing incremental improvement over quick fixes.
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Legacy enterprise organizations face compounded challenges integrating software at scale due to accumulated complexity from mergers and outdated processes.
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Community and shared learning remain critical motivators for practitioners to engage in enterprise UX, providing support in otherwise isolating roles.
Notable Quotes
"Enterprise UX is basically the design of cluster-fuck complexity, scale, and hairball relationships."
"The hardest talk of all time is five minutes, not 30 or 45."
"Enterprise is sexy – that phrase helped me get at least one job."
"The grownups’ table is where we talk about business problems and organizational complexity, not just sketching."
"Silos are everywhere—in technology companies, retail, inside silos inside silos."
"Funding models remain the biggest challenge in enterprise UX, deeply tied to power dynamics."
"The lipstick on the pig—cosmetic fixes give little impact without addressing deeper usability and business value."
"Designers must understand their domain deeply or risk being glorified production artists."
"We don’t have meetings without all three sides of the business, product, and design coming together now."
"Enterprise UX is about fixing broken systems that have a momentum of their own; it’s about improving, not quick solutions."
Or choose a question:
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