DEX and Login Enterprise: The Complete User Experience Toolkit

December 19, 2024

Ask 100 IT professionals if improving end-user experience matters to them, and you’ll likely get 100 “yes” answers without hesitation. But ask HOW they plan to achieve better user experience, and you’ll get 100 different responses—each shaped by their unique environment and challenges. 

While some might focus on user-friendly applications or building a more approachable IT support team, there’s another critical piece to the puzzle. 

In this blog, we’ll explore DEX tools and Login Enterprise, two distinct but essential solutions that help enterprises deliver the user experience their employees deserve. Let’s break down how these tools solve different problems and why you need both for complete coverage.

What is DEX?

Digital Employee Experience is a category embraced by analysts like Gartner to highlight tools that provide visibility to end-user experience by monitoring performance from the endpoint. 

Before DEX, monitoring data focused on applications, servers, and the network, but the devices end users used to access these services were invisible. Without this visibility, organizations were forced to rely on user feedback and help-desk tickets as the primary way to measure end-user experience. If no one’s complaining, things must be good, right? 

DEX tools quickly became a game-changer. Help-desk teams were more efficient because they no longer had to ask a user 20 questions when troubleshooting. Management could track an End-User Experience Score to see if things were improving, worsening, or staying consistent. Remote actions could even be triggered with automation to fix recurring issues. 

However, DEX tools are blind in a key area, which stems from how the data is gathered. Since the agent monitors real user behavior, there is nothing to collect if no human is behind the mouse and keyboard. But why does that matter? 

Given how frequently an environment changes and the pressure from Info-Sec to swiftly get updates into production, there’s a constant risk that users will log on one morning only to face slowness or downtime that wasn’t there the previous day. If the goal is to improve end-user experience, wouldn’t you want to catch and fix these problems without first impacting an employee?

Automated Testing 

Login Enterprise’s testing capabilities are powered by virtual users. Virtual users allow our customers to mimic user behavior within a desktop environment in an automated fashion while measuring performance, functionality, and scalability. 

While there is no physical robot sitting behind the computer typing and clicking, the way the virtual user interacts with the environment can be the same as it is for your business users. The virtual user logs in with AD credentials, passes through Multi-Factored Authentication, and navigates inside business applications by interacting with the various elements of the user interface.

With the ability to run on-demand or continuous automated tests, our customers no longer rely on real users being online to gauge how the IT environment is performing. There’s no shortage of use cases, but to name a few:

• Automated Change Validation: measuring the impact of image updates before releasing. Our customers appreciate the ability to share reports across teams with timers and screenshots showing that a change is ready for production. Along with saving time by reducing manual testing efforts, a better experience is delivered as the tests will catch performance degradations that add up month to month. 
• Cost/Performance Benchmarks: whether you’re evaluating laptop models, cloud hosts, storage options, etc., objectively compare your choices and use data to pick which will make your business the most successful. Users typically request new hardware or more resources, but will that lead to the productivity impact you’re looking for? 
• 24/7 Performance & Availability Checks: Continuously running tests in your production environment can identify outages or slowness immediately. This is great for unplanned changes, such as when one of your security vendors rolls out an auto-update—as the next step is confirmation that your various locations and personas will have a positive experience when they sign on.

Real World Example: Best in Class EUX

In an industry like healthcare, where poor user experience directly impacts patient care, leveraging Login Enterprise alongside a DEX tool is the best practice, as both tools bring unique perspectives and value. 

In one scenario, a clinician reported that their computer was running slow. There were no additional details, just frustration. Using a DEX tool, IT support identified a pattern: CPU spikes occurred whenever a specific application was open. Upon further investigation, they discovered that the application was running an old version. IT then checked users running the latest version of the application and found no correlation to CPU spikes. IT resolved the issue across the environment by upgrading all users to the latest version. 

In the second scenario, the environment is stable, but Info-Sec will be updating the endpoint protection software next week. Having experienced downtime from security tooling upgrades in the past, the organization ran an automated performance benchmark with Login Enterprise in a pre-production setting. By clicking a button and putting virtual users to work, the customer revealed a 60% increase in the time it takes to open a patient record. Prior to release, the EUC team collaborated with Info-Sec to ensure optimizations were applied, leading to an acceptable balance between security, user experience, and clinical efficiency.

Conclusion

Cloud migrations, hardware refreshes, Windows 11, and application modernization are among the large deliverables expected in 2025. With leadership watching, the pressure is on to complete these projects on time, within budget, and without disrupting business continuity.

We meet daily with IT professionals from all types of companies. When we ask how things are going, the answer almost always includes “busy,” “crazy,” or some combination of the two. At least once a week, a meeting needs to be rescheduled because there’s an outage or the team is working until 3:00 a.m. trying to fix something. 

Delivering projects smoothly and on schedule becomes nearly impossible when key resources are tied up troubleshooting or manually testing every update. Organizations can reduce this noise by gaining visibility into the real user experience and the ability to drive behaviors with automation and maintain a modern, stable environment with fewer surprises.