Some days, work just sucks away your energy. No matter how hard you try, you can’t move as fast as you want to.

And while we are quick to blame all sorts of things for this—did you get enough sleep, are you drinking enough water, have you found a job that satisfies your purpose?—the simple truth is that your lousy productivity might not be your fault. The culprit could be your software.

According to a new research paper published by the analyst firm Forrester—for which researchers interviewed nearly 200 design teams and dozens of frontline workers in fields like retail—the enterprise software we use at work is slowing us down, and for all sorts of reasons, from individual components of the UI to the workflows that take us from one piece of software to another.

We connected with Andrew Hogan, Forrester’s principal analyst specializing in design, who led the research. He points out some of the biggest problems he sees in these tools and offers critical insight on how some companies are fixing enterprise UX.

MORE