Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Taming Design Complexity with UX Models

Gold
Thursday, June 8, 2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Share the love for this talk
Taming Design Complexity with UX Models
Speakers: Robert Reimann
Link:

Summary

Enterprise UX is incredibly complex and nuanced. Robert Reimann is the Senior Manager, UX Design at athenahealth, and in his talk at EUX 2017 he discusses how to improve the enterprise software user experience.

Key Insights

  • Enterprise software often prioritizes corporate goals over individual user needs, leading to poor user experiences.

  • Designing and scaling enterprise software is exceptionally complex, more so than consumer products.

  • Personas remain highly valuable in enterprise UX when based on rigorous user research and tailored to roles and skills.

  • Two-tiered persona models—broad suite-level and detailed module-level—help manage complexity and scope.

  • Non-user personas, including customers (buyers) and served personas, must be considered in enterprise design, especially in healthcare.

  • Data ecology and activity sequence models visualize how data flows and are critical for understanding user interactions with systems.

  • Organizational models reflecting formal and informal behaviors, as well as corporate culture, greatly impact the success of enterprise systems.

  • Different organizational cultures (clan, ad-hocracy, controlled, market) require distinct types of enterprise software support.

  • Concept maps are powerful tools for mapping complex objects and relationships in enterprise systems and beyond.

  • System models serve as a human-readable bridge between stakeholders and engineers, enabling alignment on system mechanics.

Notable Quotes

"Even with decades of UX thinking, many enterprise systems still feel stuck in the past and don’t deliver on their promises."

"Enterprise software mainly serves corporate goals but rarely serves people goals very well within the products."

"Designing enterprise software is not just complicated to use, it’s really complicated to design."

"Personas that aren’t based on customer data may ruin your product — that’s especially true in enterprise contexts."

"In enterprise products, personas are closely related to roles and skills, but user research is essential to understand needs."

"You need two tiers of personas: broad roles at the suite level and detailed flavors at the module level."

"Organizational DNA includes formal behaviors like policies and informal ones like communication styles that software must match."

"Corporate culture types—clan, ad-hocracy, control, compete—shape what software tools will succeed or fail."

"Concept maps are the best tool for managing complex webs of objects and relationships in a system."

"System models provide a human-readable level above the database, enabling stakeholder alignment on complex features."

Ask the Rosenbot
How to Identify and Increase your "Experience Quotient"
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Carla Casariego
DesignOps in Wonderland
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Satyam Kantamneni
Do You Have an Experience Vision?
2023 • Enterprise Community
Kate Towsey
ResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt
2025 • Advancing Research Community
Soma Ghosh
What emerging methods are advancing UX research [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Josh Clark
Sentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Dave Hora
Advice for Establishing Research
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Victor M. Gonzalez
Practicing Learners and Learning Practitioners
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Laura Klein
Unique challenges of innovation in enterprises
2020 • Enterprise Community
Adam Thomas
Survival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Shipra Kayan
How Tess Dixon Facilitates Team Engagement and Collaboration at Condé Nast Using Miro 
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Deanna Zandt
The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt
2022 • Civic Design Community
Kritika Sony
Moving AI offscreen: Exploring failures, constraints, and recovery in physical game design
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Conference
Alex Hurworth
Designing a Contact Tracing App for Universal Access
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Allan Lowson
Rehashing the Double Diamond: Collaborating across functions with AI-assisted prototyping
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Conference
Kyria Stephens
Power to Heal: Civic Design in the Aftermath of Tragedy
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold

More Videos

Bria Alexander

"Practical ops is about getting stuff done because it’s our job to scale the organizational ability to design and amplify the work of designers."

Bria Alexander

Theme Two Intro

October 3, 2023

Ariba Jahan

"On days with many user interviews, the team wanted internal meetings video off to take a break from 'smiling all day.'"

Ariba Jahan

Team Resiliency Through a Pandemic

January 8, 2024

Cornelius Rachieru

"We tend to put the end user first, but we must also ask who we might be doing harm to beyond primary users."

Cornelius Rachieru

Handling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design

June 9, 2021

Megan Clegg

"Olivia isn’t disabled, she’s just in a situation that makes accessibility critical."

Megan Clegg Michael Haggerty-Villa Alexis Morin

Space for Everyone: Reframing Accessibility Through a Wider Lens

June 10, 2021

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Publishing a component library means anyone can update titles or roles, and it updates everywhere at once."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Cartography for Design Communities

September 10, 2025

Kara Kane

"Civic design and government design practice have reached many milestones in the past 10 years."

Kara Kane

Theme One Intro

November 16, 2022

Natalia Radywyl

"The system had catastrophically failed to live up to expert expectations and was underprepared for future challenges."

Natalia Radywyl

Co-Designing New Power in Australia's Public Sector

November 16, 2022

Nancy Douyon

"The nobility complex is when we in the West unintentionally create solutions without accounting for our own biases."

Nancy Douyon

We'll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech's Nobility Complex

June 15, 2018

Peter Van Dijck

"Eval is the engineering word for evaluation, but also what researchers and UX designers naturally do."

Peter Van Dijck

Building the Rosenbot

June 4, 2024