Digitising a business process using enterprise UX design: a quickstart guide

Many organisations are now looking for ways to improve, streamline, and automate their processes. Digitising business processes that were once non-digital or semi-digital has become a major focus in recent years. However, it’s not always clear how to start this journey, especially when considering enterprise UX design for large-scale systems.

Identifying where to focus your efforts can seem overwhelming. That’s why we wanted to share what we’ve learned from our experience helping organisations create innovative digital tools that increase the value they deliver—especially as part of a broader enterprise automation strategy.

Why do this?

Create value for your team
Inefficient and outdated internal processes cost businesses money every day, slowing down teams and impeding productivity. The value of improvement here is clear: a well-designed enterprise UX can help your team accomplish more with less effort. Not to mention the improvement in job satisfaction when using tools that are intuitive, efficient, and pleasant to work with.

With the right enterprise automation strategy, these internal workflows can be further optimised to reduce human error and increase operational efficiency.

Create value for your customers
A motivated and efficient team does their best work, which, in turn, positively impacts your customers. Efficiency doesn’t just improve internal processes; it also enhances customer-facing aspects, leading to better customer relationships and repeat business. With enterprise automation, these customer-facing workflows can be optimised for speed, accuracy, and scalability.

Differentiate your business
Your business likely exists in a crowded marketplace. A fantastic new digital tool, even if not customer-facing, can serve as a powerful marketing asset. Moreover, the value of appearing more innovative through enterprise UX design can propel your growth and set you apart from competitors. With enterprise automation driving efficiencies across the organisation, you’ll also gain a competitive edge in delivering superior service.

If you follow the steps we lay out here, you’ll be in a great position to move forward with purpose, and you’ll make any digital agency you approach to partner with very happy!

#1 Highlighting inefficiencies

Your organisation already runs a variety of processes—some digital, some semi-digital, and some fully manual. There will undoubtedly be room for improvement in some areas, as no business is perfect.

The first step is to gain a broad overview of potential candidates for digitising. Think of it as a “once-over” of where your business is now in terms of workflows and tools.

List your processes
Draw up a list of your current business processes, and rate their performance in order to identify where inefficiencies lie. This can be a simple 1-5 or you can get more granular and split out who and what they are (in)efficient for.

Impact scoring
Now that you have a rated list of processes, consider the severity of each inefficiency and the potential impact of automation. Which changes would make the most difference? Prioritise areas that will offer the highest return on investment, especially those that can be optimised through enterprise UX design and enterprise automation.

Document tools
Paint a picture of the digital landscape in your organisation by documenting the tools you currently use. Early identification of existing tools is critical, as any new enterprise UX design solution must be able to integrate seamlessly with these platforms. Similarly, if you’re introducing automation, it’s important to ensure compatibility with existing tools for smooth workflow integration.

#2 Identifying problems

Now that you’ve identified a candidate process or two to explore, it’s time to dig deeper. Why aren’t these processes working as efficiently as possible?

What are the specific pains being encountered?

Interview key people in the business who work use them and ask them about the good and the bad elements. If you’re talking to lots of people, keep a tally of how frequently issues are mentioned. If something’s mentioned more often, it’s probably a bigger problem.

Mapping out the process flow is key here. Show how each stakeholder moves through the process, detailing the various options and outcomes they encounter. Highlight areas of inefficiency and frustration. Tools like LucidChart or even PowerPoint can help with this, but don’t underestimate the value of good old Post-its and whiteboards in a team workshop setting!

Draw personas

If you don’t already have customer personas, now’s the time to create them. Most business processes interact with customers in some way, so understanding who they are will help design solutions that truly meet their needs. Enterprise UX design is all about creating processes that work for both internal teams and external customers.

Draw up personas of customers if you don’t have them established. Most business processes interact with a customer, if you don’t have a persona of these people now’s a good time to do it.

So you’ve now got a documented series of flows and some ideas around where pain lies.

#3 Research the market

Before reinventing the wheel, it’s important to check whether a pre-built solution can meet your needs. Sometimes, an off-the-shelf product may do 90% of what you need. Is the extra 10% worth the investment in developing a custom solution?

In many cases, there’s no reason to assume that a solution doesn’t already exist. Whether you’re looking for a tool to enhance workflows or enable enterprise automation, there are countless platforms and products out there that could meet your requirements.

It sounds obvious, but unless your business’s purpose is making project management tools, you definitely shouldn’t be out there trying to make one to beat Basecamp.

Criteria to consider when researching tools

• Feature set
  Does the tool provide the features you need? Are there additional features that may be useful in the future?
• Integration
  Does the tool integrate well with other systems, especially in an enterprise environment where you may have multiple tools in play?
• Company maturity
  Is the tool offered by an established company, or is it a newer startup?
• Sector experience / nicheness
  Do they just cater to your niche or are they a one size fits all tool?
• Customisation
  Can you easily customise the tool to suit your unique business needs?
• Cost
  What are the pricing structures, and do they scale with your organisation’s growth?
• Support
  Is there a dedicated support team and how quickly do they claim to react to your requests? Is there documentation about any service level agreement and what does it include? If this is a business critical process then you’ll need to understand how you’re covered.

Choosing a tool that offers both a good enterprise UX design and the ability to scale with your automation needs can significantly impact the efficiency of your workflows.

#4 Get the team together

If you can’t find a pre-built solution, it’s time to get creative and build your own. To do this, gather a cross-functional team from different areas of the business. If possible, bring in customers for valuable insights that may not be evident from an internal perspective.

Review your existing processes and sketch out how they could be improved using digital tools. Look to other tools you use for inspiration and draw on features that have worked well in the past. With enterprise UX design in mind, think about how you can optimise the user experience for both internal teams and external users.

Read all about the workshop we ran with the Not Actual Size team to generate potential solutions, pitch their ideas and form the scope of their new digital tools.

#5 Building a product specification

With your ideas in place, you can begin to build a high-level product specification. This document should outline the features you expect in your tool, with categories for essential features, nice-to-haves, and exploratory features that may require further discussion.

If you want to get into more detail then assign a category for each feature. Some will be essentials, some would be nice to have, some might be wildcard ideas that need more exploration and discussion. Understanding priorities is important to get to an MVP launch.

Lighthouse podcast

Weighting and rating - how to prioritise your backlog

For more about roadmaps and deciding which features to prioritise, check out our ‘weighting and rating’ podcast.

This will serve as a blueprint for your team and any external vendors or development partners you work with. The goal is to ensure that the tool you’re creating solves your identified problems efficiently and is built with enterprise UX design principles in mind.

Taking this blueprint to a design and development team will give them a solid understanding of your needs. They’ll be able to refine the concept further and start building an automated, user-friendly solution that can scale with your business.

• The problems you’re solving
• Your users’ interaction with the process
• The problem areas and issues they face
• What you deem to be important in a solution

It’s then down to that team to refine further and bring their expertise into the picture. Don’t expect to end up with exactly what you’ve mapped out – that’s rarely how MVPs work and that’s a good thing.

You’ll need detailed thoughts around user experience, design and how to actually build the finished article, but this is the perfect starting point.

Our services

Idea to launch

Want to skip uncertainty and get straight to creating a product people love? Let us take you from idea to launch. 🚀

Read more