Designing Digital Services for Knowledge Workers: Good Enough is not Good Enough

By Oscar Berg (@oscarberg) Oct 17, 2011

While the workforce is increasingly occupied with knowledge work, it is not seen nearly as business critical as production or service delivery. For this reason, many knowledge workers have had to put up with poorly designed enterprise digital services. Executives and decision-makers must learn that “good enough” is just not good enough when it comes to designing digital services for enterprise use.

In 1977, when I was just 5 years old, my father founded a company that started selling personal computers in Sweden. During the years ahead, I got the opportunity to try out and use a lot of different PCs, from the Commodore PET and the ABC 80 (from the Swedish company Luxor) to the IBM PC. Yet it wasn't until 1984, when I laid my hands on a Mac for the first time, that I got really hooked on computers.

I had never been interested in programming, and with the Mac I quickly found out that I could do amazing things with the only two programs I had: MacPaint and MacWrite. I came to realize that I could use a computer for things I already loved to do: drawing and writing. It was the first time a computer became useful to me, and using the Mac was an uplifting experience, unlike anything I had experienced before. It was completely intuitive and I started playing around immediately, needing no instructions. The difference between the IBM PC and the Apple Mac was like night and day.

I have only had a similar kind of experience once again since then, and it was when I switched from a Samsung smartphone with Windows 6 mobile to iPhone 3G in 2008. Everything that I used to do with my Samsung was just so much easier to do with the iPhone. I came to realize how I had struggled to do even simple things such as texting or emailing before. I immediately knew that turning back was not an option.

These two products, the Mac and the iPhone, have not only had a profound impact on my own use of computers and smartphones, but indisputable they have also had a profound impact on the entire computer and mobile phone industries. In fact, these two industries are now converging as a result of the iPhone. The Mac turned computers into something that people, who weren't programmers or accountants, found usable and really enjoyed using. The iPhone turned smartphones into something that the not so tech-savvy users could use and feel smart using.

It’s All about Simplicity

Steve Jobs and the folks at Apple have known all along what so many in the IT industry still do not know, or at least do not act upon if they know it: that a great user experience is the silver bullet to getting people to want to use computers and that the core of a great user experience is simplicity. A simple product is one that inhabits fitness, which is suited for its purpose; it has all the properties that are needed for its specific purpose — no more, no less. Simplicity is not just a matter of reduction, but rather about achievement of maximum effect with minimum means. It is about unifying and making something meaningful out of separate pieces.

As anyone can understand, simplicity requires serious thought and effort. Apple knows this, and Steve Jobs made them recall this when he returned to Apple in 1997. Once again they started to put their focus and dedication on making their products as simple as possible, knowing that simplicity itself is a differentiator. Not features, not technical specifications, but simplicity.

Enterprise Apps & the User Experience

It was my experiences from using my first Mac that got me interested in how to use computers for creative tasks, an interest that I later turned into a career. Today, I spend my days trying to make organizations understand the importance of usability and user experience when designing services and the digital work environment for knowledge workers. Although I use different terms to describe what I do, such as Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business, what I essentially do is to find ways for us to work smarter together by making the digital services we use to get our work done more usable, uplifting and intuitive to use. Simplicity is the overarching principle we need to follow to achieve this.