Enterprise Apps - Reinvent your Digital Application Portfolio

Enterprise Applications (EA) have become paramount to organizational success regardless of the size of the industry, type of deployment, and end-user industry. It has gained quite momentum in the last few years and is expected to rise exponentially in the coming years. The blog reflects on things to be considered while designing UX for an EA, the best practices to follow, and future trends of EA that will help you reinvent your digital portfolio.

Figures First

The Global Enterprise Application Market was valued at USD 9.65 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 22.69 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of 15.42%, over the forecast period 2021 – 2026. 

EA and its objectives – The figures are promising and undeniably every dynamic. Multifaceted enterprise needs equally dynamic and multifaceted EA to thrive in the fast-growing digital economy. The objective behind creating an EA are myriad, such as

• Drive innovation and respond quickly to challenges
• Build a strategy and business case for modernizing
• Break down data silos that decrease operational performance
• Optimize investments to create actionable insights
• Accelerate time to value with expert strategy and integration
• Operate with flexibility and empower faster decision making

Developing EA? Things to consider and best practices to follow – But all said and done, most business owners still fail to realize the importance of a suitable EA for their enterprise and focus more on features, functionality, and aesthetics than usability. An insufficient budget for UX is also an impediment towards creating a perfect EA.

Before designing an EA, you must consider the following 

• Understanding end-user’s mental model is very important, 
• Users use EA to accomplish their day-to-day tasks, not because of their personal preferences or liking. 
• The nature of enterprise applications is mostly task-oriented. Any frills-and-fancy can be avoided and the focus should be on improving the efficiency of work.

Best Practices – An EA success depends upon how methodically you have developed it and how easy or simple your users find it to use. The better the practices, the better the results

• Do not reinvent established design patterns, follow the conventions.
• Make good use of empty states.
• Prefer soft-delete over permanent-delete.
• Manage session timeout better. Prevent data loss. Avoid wasting the time and effort of the user. Enable users to customize session time-out duration.
• Provide contextual help as and when needed.
• Provide clear feedback after completing an action.
• Break down long processes into smaller steps and wizards
• Assist users in suggesting the actions they need to take to complete or continue the task.

EA and its future – Business organizations are quick to implement EA that helps in uniting the databases and workflows. Trends, such as diverse workflow solutions, BYOD, migration to cloud-based solutions, and real-time application integration and technologies like Big Data and IoT shall be driving the market’s growth positively.

Lastly, competitive pricing, proper post-implementation maintenance, and faster integration while running multiple applications will make an EA march ahead.

Major Enterprise Applications available in the enterprise application market