Beyond Visuals: Addressing Cognitive Load and Usability Challenges in an Enterprise Mobile Application Design

Abstract

Enterprise organizations rely on mobile dashboards to support performance monitoring and decision making (Few, 2013). They are expected to provide timely access to critical metrics, enable situational awareness, and support fast-paced decision making across distributed teams. However, as enterprise systems evolve and data volume increases, these dashboards often become difficult to interpret. Although the project was initially framed as a visual update, early research pointed to deeper challenges related to usability, information architecture, data comprehension, and workflow alignment. Through a multi-phase mixed-methods research program with 81 enterprise sales users, the study surfaced recurring workflow misalignments, information architecture barriers, and role-dependent information needs that hindered day-to-day use. This program included interviews, surveys, and iterative usability testing. The findings show how user research reframed the problem space, challenged long-held assumptions, and informed design exploration toward clearer data presentation and more effective decision support. This case study highlights the role of user research in revealing systemic experience issues within complex enterprise mobile applications. It also offers insights for designing data-intensive tools that better support how users actually interpret and act on data in mobile contexts.

Keywords: User Research, Usability, Cognitive Load, Enterprise Mobile Applications, Human Centered Design, Information Architecture

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1008041