Ease of Use: The easiest means of adoption is providing an intuitive and familiar experience, and one that offers improvements in function, if not in form. While it may not sound logical, people prefer to perform the same tasks, yet expect different results. For UX designers, this means that while users may not be satisfied with the current service, any improvements can’t contain too many new elements that create extra work. The ready acceptance of incremental change is a driving force behind the Enterprise-as-a-Service trend. Practices such as offering versions between major platform upgrades ask customers to take the stairs to each update, rather than climb a wall.

Simplicity: This final -- and perhaps overarching -- principle of UX design refers to people enjoying experiences they can understand easily. To create a simple experience for UC users, channel partners need to understand their legacy pain points, what confuses them about a product, and how they like to interact with a platform. In essence, resellers need to empathize with their customers and see things from their perspective. For the channel, that means focusing on not only providing piecemeal UC products, but total solutions that also take into consideration the ability of IT to keep any updates or changes from hampering the end user’s experience.

While accounting for diverse communication styles and a “bring your own experience” culture might complicate the old-school reseller business model, it also opens up new opportunities for those willing to look past what the channel was to see its future potential. By taking a comprehensive view of UX throughout hardware, software and services, resellers can provide their customers with new tools. For example, resellers can help customers turn endpoint devices into valuable data collection tools that assist interactions with customers on UC platforms. They can help companies adapt to the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce by offering services such as centralized device management.

Ultimately, they can open the door to solve problems for both the IT buyers and end users of UC products.