There is, without a doubt, a very large and steady shift towards enhancing what is coined as the “User Experience” (UX) in application and software development. Whereas this particular issue was not of a concern for developers years ago, it has slowly shifted to become of the most important in application and software design.

As little as five years ago, developers weren’t really concerned with UX or user-friendly interfaces, except for a few innovators, such as Steve Jobs. Increasingly, developers have begun to realise that the difference between creating powerful applications and making sure that these applications are widely adopted lies in the secret of User Experience.

Things began to change in around the early 2000s when Apple raised the bar in the user experience department and clearly proved to everyone that when users feel comfortable with the interface and experience, mass adoption of the products is the results. Since then, everything about the way people expect to experience technology has changed: users simply expect systems to work and do what they need.

With mobile proliferation worth billions of dollars and bring your own device (BYOD) projections equaling billions more, people are bringing their high tech devices to work with the expectation that enterprise applications will at least work as well as what they use at home. This consumerism of the User Experience has put enterprise IT on pressure to deliver simpler and more beautiful applications, because users’ tolerance to complex, ugly and kafkian processes has dramatically reduced.

With that said, it is very clear that if IT wants to stay relevant to organisations and to their users, they must not only keep the user’s needs in mind, but must also actively cater to them. If an IT department of an organisation realises that delivering enterprise apps to mobile devices and make sure that the applications are going to be adopted by users, then the UX strategy needs to be scaled.

At the current time, according to the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) nearly 15 per cent of projects are usually being abandoned and in the top 12 reasons that these projects fail, three of them are related to User Experience.

The inability to get the UX and User Friendly-interface right is extremely vital to the success of IT projects. Making sure that getting the user experience in-house and under control is as important today as building secure systems.

Because User Experience is a very unusual combination of mastering both art and science, it requires for developers to have cross-functional capabilities and new, innovative ways of thinking. It requires a developer that not only appreciates good design, but also a designer that understands application development and its importance. In short, engineers need to work in computing languages, but think in human experience. Engineers need to walk in the shoes of the users and build the system from that perspective inwards.

There are two main reasons that IT teams usually overlook UX and the importance of User Usability: the first reason is related to time. Many are under the impression that if they take the time to add usability concerns to their projects, then the projects will take considerably longer and with project durations already long, the risk is unappealing.

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The second reason is related to access and costs. Many IT teams do not have in-house resources, and hiring external usability consultants is considered too expensive.

Although these might be relevant points, to a certain extent, IT teams must consider that User Experience is not an add-on to a project that will increase its time and cost, on the contrary. User Experience is a philosophy where you build and change the systems thinking in what the user really needs. In most circumstances, if you do that, you end up having to deliver much less functionalities and the right ones, resulting in less effort to deliver the first version and less effort in the continuous maintenance of the system as it includes only what is needed and not all the extra functionality IT “thought” it would be needed.

Additionally, when improving existing systems, rather than spending a lot of money on UX for the entire functionality set, investments should be made to those parts that are used 80 per cent of the time, or areas that present serious UX problems, again to the point that you need to focus on the user and his needs.

In order to help IT teams understand the resources necessary for building highly usable systems, there are many online initiatives that help with such topics. For example, there are toolkits that are especially designed to help IT departments adopt and scale their UX strategies. It contains an eBook outlining 11 usability principles for developers, along with examples.

All in all, to develop a good UX the key is to ultimately understand your users’ experience. That means you cannot assume what the user needs, but rather engage your users in the project, go to the field and observe them, ask questions and ultimately look to understand user needs in their working context.

To use a car analogy, it’s about the driving experience, the car look and feel, the car performance and efficiency at several levels; it’s not about what’s under the bonnet.

The writer is the Director of OutSystems for Middle East and Africa.