Craig Roth, Gartner’s Managing Vice President of Communication, Collaboration, and Content recently blogged that the demands to manage the firehose of information displayed in enterprise systems has created a subset of user experience design he refers to as attentional experience design.
As a user experience designer wrangling how activity streams, status updates, conversations, and other activity are displayed to the enterprise workforce, I can attest that what Mr. Roth calls attentional experience will ultimately be a critical product differentiator as we see more dashboards, content aggregators, activity streams and other collaboration platforms deployed.
I’m not sure it needs its own name though, particularly when he writes that a “business… [is] disadvantaged even if the individual user’s experience is fantastic.” I think such a statement inadvertently reduces design (and UX) to merely decoration to provide a less-prioritized “sense of happiness”.
I’m sure we agree effective enterprise system design solves business needs and provides the information worker efficient, predictable steps to accomplish business tasks. If a person interacting with the system loves the icons, color scheme, and transition fades but isn’t seeing business critical information, the design is a failure, pure and simple.
I’m also concerned that using yet another name in stakeholder meetings or even amongst the product teams can splinter alignment and lead us into more “define the damn thing” conversations that distract us from designing quality work. There are enough misconceptions over what the creative department delivers versus the user experience team and who owns what without further obfuscating expected roles and responsibilities.
But again I’m relieved to see Mr. Roth call attention to what so many software vendors have failed to do in their design process: prioritize what functionality is at the ready to solve business problems, instead of simply providing a laundry list of tools with no implied or suggested importance of one feature over another and no consideration for which task may be at hand.
As we see more demand for social curation of content, updates by hundreds of connections, and multiple activities in a single action, understanding how to prioritize information can quickly distinguish companies from others more than just a checklist of features alone.
Note: this post was originally a comment on the Gartner blog post itself, but never appeared on the site.
