Return on Experience: An Ethnographic Study of Commitment to UX Quality in Enterprise Software Development

The enterprise software industry has traditionally been conservative in adopting human-centered design principles, which only became widely recognized after proving their impact in the con-sumer product industry. For decades, enterprise software was purchased by executives who prior-itized technical capabilities over user experience, resulting in software which often lacked user input and treated user experience mainly as aesthetics. As one informant described, this led to software "built for the reports people would generate over the data, rather than for the people entering the data."
However, this is changing. Companies in the enterprise software industry are increasingly making connections between high quality user experience and efficiency in use of professional software. The popularization of new technologies, such as cloud computing and generative AI, and users’ increased influence in the purchasing process have forced companies to re-explore user experi-ence as a means of gaining a competitive advantage in the market. This means breaking with old perceptions of the business value of user experience, exploring alternative ways of incorporating human-centered principles, and committing to user experience quality more systematically. Since this differs so significantly from past approaches, making such changes necessitates a cultural transition within organizations in the enterprise software context. This approach requires a high level of design maturity, with an integrated design discipline that contributes strategically to de-cision-making in early development, which has historically not been the case in enterprise soft-ware development.
With the example of the enterprise software group at Microsoft, this dissertation provides an em-pirical contribution to the understanding of what that transition looks like in a large, established technology company. This dissertation presents an ethnographic study of the transition towards a more return on experience driven approach, where user experience quality is prioritized at an organizational level, and how this materializes on product teams. Drawing on data collected from 2021 to 2024, as well as oral history accounts from the group’s formative years, this research explores the changes to the perception of the business value of user experience over time, across different levels of design maturity. This study contributes to a deeper and more nuanced under-standing of commitment to user experience quality in the enterprise software context. The findings introduced in this dissertation provide valuable insights for both academics and practitioners.