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May 15, 2018
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May 15, 2018
Elizabeth Gin, LinkedIn Senior User Experience Researcher, says there’s an undiscovered treasure when it comes to Enterprise customers: the admin user. This key group of under-studied users often act as the gatekeepers for enterprise products—managing accounts, allocating product licenses, and onboarding their fellow employees onto different tools.
Elizabeth breaks down how understanding the workflow and needs of this group of “hidden users” can help uncover critical insights into how tools are implemented and used across companies.
People Nerds spoke with Gin as part of a “deep dive” conversation series with LinkedIn’s Enterprise UX team.
Exactly. My husband is an avid birder, and I go along with him on a lot of his trips. And one thing I’ve learned through the birding journey is that birds are everywhere. They're in the city, they're in fields, they're in deserts, places where you think there is no life, there are birds there—you just have to notice them. And once you begin to notice them, your experience of the world and the ecosystem becomes so much more alive and vibrant and full.
“I love shining a spotlight on the unknown or the hidden.”
Elizabeth Gin
That’s one thing I found in my work at LinkedIn in terms of uncovering these hidden users. Though they’re not necessarily always the focus of product teams, they're actually super, super crucial. We refer to these folks as enterprise product administrators.
So, they're basically the people that make the whole ship run. They understand the workflow of who at their company is using what product and how. Without them, the enterprise product might not effectively roll out, and may or may not be successful. Once you learn about them your understanding of the enterprise product experience becomes that much more complete.
The biggest thing is that for these employees, managing an enterprise product is often not their full-time job. They have a job outside of being the administrator for the tool.
“Enterprise product administrators take on managing a tool because they believe in it, they’ve identified a need that they think the tool could help solve for and they have chosen to design a program around it and champion it.”
Elizabeth Gin
Enterprise product administrators take on managing a tool because they believe in it, they've identified a need that they think the tool could help solve for and they have chosen to design a program around it and champion it.
And although it isn’t their full-time job, I’ve found that administrators are often willing to go the extra mile to help make the product successful at their company. That really inspires me to go the extra mile for them, and work to streamline their experience to make managing the enterprise product even easier so it in fact doesn't become their full time job!
Absolutely. If they’re not doing well, if they're not satisfied with the product, if they don't feel like they're able to get what they need done, that can be an indicator of the health of that product at that company. So it's just one more reason for companies to really invest in understanding these hidden users, because they really have a lot of insight and control over the success of an enterprise product at a company.
In a way, it actually comes back to the birding example. Birds are often representative of the health of that ecosystem. If you find that there isn't a thriving community of birds in your ecosystem, then that may be a sign that ecosystem isn't doing so well. I’ve come to think about our enterprise product administrators in a similar way.
