Hypothesis: improving quality of consumer Technology raises UX expectations of corporate software.
When your users experience improves at home, what effect does that have on what they expect at work? Let's explore.
The pressure on IT teams appears to be at an all time high. They contend with rising frustration from users, increasing complexity of operations and involvement in more aspects of each organisation than ever before.
In this post I will focus on one contributing factor (I believe there are several, which I will cover in subsequent posts) - the effect of the lift in user experiences in consumer technology and it's effect on the expectations of users in their work context.
Technology has become ubiquitous in the home over the last decade. The proportion of incomes for middle class households which are now devoted to Software-as-a-Service subscriptions is significant and the reliability and user friendliness of these services has lifted as a result.
In the early adoption of these services what would be tolerated compared to now is vastly different. Whilst startup services still exist the base level of quality they can offer building on top of more mature cloud services and user interface frameworks and supporting tooling is much higher.
Consumers now have lower tolerance for downtime, lower tolerance for poor user experiences and steep learning curves.
And so too this is translating into the office. Initially a lag between consumer and office experiences can be explained by a lack of belief due to lack of social proof experiences in the workplace could be different.
That is quickly changing as it's demonstrated that better experiences and better offerings are available exhibiting the traits they are used to in the technology they use at home.
And so what is asked for and what is expected in the workplace increases with IT teams caught flatfooted. For many their defence against poor experiences was to limit the amount of change that occured.
The slow responsiveness to needs in many cases had already opened a chasm between meeting needs and keeping the lights on. And now that gap is being levered open as what was unpleasant is now deemed unacceptable.
An obvious example has been in the office productivity suites. Google’s suite, now known as Google Workspaces ushered in a new era of cloud native, collaborative working with documents.
After a slow start Microsoft have established a competent offering in Microsoft 365. Organisations were slow initially to adopt and it's fair to say even the late adopters are now coming onboard. And if this was the only change IT teams had to navigate it would be a small speed bump in their evolution.
But as I will expand on in a future post technology has pervaded all aspects of the organisation. Seismic shifts in terms of the technology used and how it all interacts within the office ecosystem are happening across the board.
What shifts have you seen? What friction did that lead to? Share in the comments.