The annual subscription to the antivirus software on my home PC ran out last week. The software had of course been dutifully alerting me to its impending expiry for the past few weeks, with urgent entreaties for me to visit the vendor’s website and renew the subscription. When I did visit the website, I found it offered me an upgraded package which, it assured me, would provide me far superior protection. Some features that had been part of my expired subscription were now available only with the upgraded package. Not wanting to be bereft of this superior, expanded protection, I obligingly signed up for this advanced (and higher-priced) package. Of course, had I chosen to renew the standard lower-priced package, I would have lost some features I had been enjoying earlier.

A good user experience with IT is, at least in concept, hardly something that is esoteric. The elements that define it — whether for the enterprise or the consumer — are not hard to imagine. The software or hardware should be easy to install and get to work. The user should have no trouble figuring out how to use it — the application flow should fit well with the familiar way of doing things, without using alien terminologies or assuming a level of knowledge that the user does not have. The user should not have to interact with multiple systems to accomplish a simple task. Efforts to get support, renewals or upgrades should not prove harrowing. And — particularly in the enterprise scenario — it shouldn’t take an inordinate length of time for the IT solution to materialize.

The reality is somewhat more mixed. While there may be a few users who would describe their experience with IT in superlative terms, the vast majority would be more guarded. It does not require a Herculean effort for most users to think of an experience of their own that fell short on at least one of the dimensions outlined above.

When do enterprises, despite having perfectly capable, well-intentioned people equipped with the best development tools and methodologies, end up delivering IT user experiences that are less than edifying? When they don’t stretch enough to make IT fit the user’s need.

To be sure, many needs of enterprise users are encoded in business processes and written policies. Those aren’t usually the needs that demand a stretch, and they are usually at the intersection of what IT can deliver and what users have requested (see Figure 1).

However, much of what users really need lies in the realm of unstated needs — wishes the user cannot easily verbalize: the deft handling of exceptions to the defined business process, the additional nuances of understanding acquired through long practice, that bit of personal expertise needed to fill in where the defined process doesn’t cover fine-grained detail, the tips and tricks learned over the years. Will the user tell you that the IT solution must cater to needs such as these? Rarely. Will users tell you that they need to feel secure and cared for? Almost never.

Thus, in the figure, while it’s easy enough (and tempting) for IT to provide users with technical features they did not request, it’s far more important to anticipate the unstated requirements. That’s where the stretch is required. And here are some ways by which this stretch can be made to improve the enterprise IT experience.

Tap into the user’s greater understanding.

Put users to work. Get them deeply involved — in reviewing and giving feedback on design, and in testing. Pilot a lot, and deploy iteratively to give experience time to sink in. Involve users who are helpful, and also a few who are not “understanding.”

Lead the user toward discovery.

Unstated user needs, while difficult to observe directly, can often be divined via joint exploration. In this journey into the unknown, you have to lead. Prototyping is a great way to guide this exploration. Mashups can be an attractive approach for quickly putting together a working prototype.

Expectations matter: Each side should be willing to learn from the other, and to learn nothing at all.

It’s the user’s need, remember?

Customers of the antivirus vendor mentioned at the beginning of this piece must have more than a sneaking feeling that they come second behind their vendor’s commercial considerations. This is an excellent example of pulling zone B towards the right.

Ask yourself: Are we forcing the user to take the “best” we can offer? Often, he or she needs less.

Every feature should pass the “true need” test: Is it there because the user needs it (zone A or B), or because we can provide it (zone C)?

Unearth buried user needs.

Many user needs that are going unmet may be uncovered by asking: If we didn’t have the constraints that we do, what more would we give the user? Until the late ’90s, organizations did not provide e-mail on a large scale to employees, primarily owing to the constraints of licenses and network bandwidth, and fears of productivity loss. In the last few years, it has come to be accepted that providing e-mail organization-wide not only helps meet many employee needs that were going unmet, but also provides significant productivity advantages.

As another example, employees have long felt the need to connect into business-critical applications on the enterprise network from outside the office. The idea of allowing this was nixed by enterprises for many years, primarily on grounds of security. Now, virtual private networks routinely help meet this need. Similarly, wireless LAN and instant messaging have received employee uptake while raising productivity.

A good way to test your IT organization’s willingness to overcome constraints is to ask: How do we react we learn what our product doesn’t do?

Another technique to uncover such needs may be to see what technologies your customers use that you don’t provide. Personal computers were slow to enter the enterprise. VoIP and wikis are other technologies whose enterprise absorption was constrained by security considerations.

Allow the user to be human.

Understand human limitations. If humans had infinite memory or information processing power, or instantaneous response times, much of our technology wouldn’t be needed in the first place. The technology should adapt to human limitations and not vice versa.

Keep users with disabilities in mind. Not only do they have special needs, but observing from their perspective can help identify issues that may not be evident otherwise. In a sense, they are lead users.

Dr. V.P. Kochikar is associate vice president and principal consultant for Infosys Technologies (NASDAQ: INFY), a leading provider of IT consulting and solution services. His weblog appears at www.webquarters.blogspot.com.