User Experience Is Critical to Remote Work Success

The challenge and the opportunity now facing stakeholders is to maximize the remote work environment. Government agencies were already moving to telework options leading up to March 2020, but that impacted a small percentage of employees a fraction of the time. 

 Now, employees feel comfortable working in remote environments, which has become an expectation. For technology leaders, this means remote work solutions must rise to meet demand.

"We have enabled remote work in the past, but never focused as much on the user experience as perhaps we should have," said Jose Arvelo,  Senior Manager for Sales Engineering at Citrix. "User experience translates into productivity, so our goal must be to provide remote workers with the same level of experience they receive from commercial applications."

Changing the remote worker experience

Workers today – especially younger generations – expect work tools to act similar to commercial applications. They want tools that look, feel, and behave in similar ways, and they want the user experience to be intuitive. Citrix continues to improve its applications to meet that standard. 

 For example, Citrix applications provide insight into a user's bandwidth to ensure peak performance. A tool running through the Wi-Fi at a coffee shop may not perform as it would at home on a hardline connection. From an application performance perspective, it is critical to understand where issues are and why they occur. 

"It's super important that as IT providers, we're laser-focused on providing that user experience that translates into productivity. Happy users equal adoption, which shows itself in real productivity gains," Arvelo said.

Remembering the human element

While workers certainly appreciate the lack of a commute, the human element of work can get left behind in remote work situations. Part of Citrix's goal is to ensure that the social and collaborative components of work do not get overlooked. 

 A major component of this is collaboration technology such as messaging, video, and presence that helps workers stay engaged. "Telework is here to stay, and being able to provide a workforce with flexibility is going to be a key component of the future of work," Arvelo said.

However, while we can enable things with technology, that doesn't mean that people are going to embrace it. At the end of the day, humans must be willing to make the changes required to embrace the technology and see the benefit. It's incumbent upon engineers and technologists to paint that picture in a way that users embrace it. 

This is where World Wide Technology comes in. WWT helps our customers and partners close this gap. We simplify the complex and show the value of emerging technology. By doing so, we are helping make a new world happen!

For more information on the impact of user experience on remote work success, please listen to Episode E09 of the Public Sector Tech Talk series.