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This site is a work in progress. Last updated January 2023.
The priority of utility over usability.
There is a particular area in the field of Product Design and User Experience Design where the usual User Centred Design process is simply not enough, this area is the design of complex applications.
There are many things that make software development complex. But the heart of this complexity is the essential intricacy of the problem domain itself. If you're trying to add automation to complicated human enterprise, then your software cannot dodge this complexity, all it can do is control it.Martin Fowler - Domain Driven Design
Complexity is often looked on as a thing to avoid when designing apps, but what if you can't? What if the app you're working on is for spreadsheet manipulation, design work or data mining? What if AI isn't the answer? When this is the case, all you can do to remove complexity is to remove utility. This is fruitless as people need to do their work, and if they can't do their work, they can't use your app.In the following articles we'll explore the main ways to design applications and in what areas complex application design is an aberration to standard app design. Areas such as onboarding, developing personas, users stories, task flows and other standard techniques need special attention, and in some cases just don't work well all and should be replaced by alternatives. This is not a well documented discipline and the lack of writing on the topic is perhaps easily explained in that it's a genuinely difficult and nuanced area of product design which is still heavily researched. This is because it doesn't neatly follow laws or tweetable truths. In fact many of the famous quotable catch all laws are turned into a bit of a nightmarish quagmire due to the requirement for a product to be useful at a given task; usually because of its indented use in a professional environment. It would be very simple to design a spreadsheet app with almost no features at all, it would also be very easy to use. For us, this kind of thinking isn't an option, what if we need all the features, how do we go about designing for that requirement?
Source: All of Dribbble.
Let's take an obvious example of this, an aeroplane cockpit, here there are a great many controls, all required, as you know, to allow a human pilot to fly a plane, in some cases planes are so complex, that two people are required to operate the controls. A good UI designer cannot magically distill all these controls into a single button, such an interface is going to be complex simply due to the irreducible intricacy of the problem being solved.All this means that designing complex systems necessitates the priority of utility over usability because the job needs to get done; if you have found yourself triggered by that last statement, you've come to the right place; CxUX is somewhat counter intuitive to the many of us who learned our trade with phrases like the best interface is no interface ringing in our ears.Making everything overly-simple is not how you should design software for professional users, instead you should aim to allow users to complete their work as efficiently, quickly and easily as possible.The split that we're interested in, is that something can be complex and difficult to use, or something can be complex and much easier to use. This site hopes to explain how to design for the latter; don't confuse complexity with difficulty of use.
A word of warning, these articles aren’t written for beginners, this is simply because there is a wealth of utterly exceptional beginner friendly literature out there for UX design, so I'm going to assume a certain level of knowledge, including a familiarity with things like Jakob’s 10 Usability Heuristics and Gestalt psychology. I will however link to beginner friendly articles where appropriate. It is my intention that there will be something of value or interest here for all product and UX designers, product managers, and even UX engineers and software developers in general. Given the vagaries around the naming and overlapping nature of software design roles, you can assume my use of Product Design and UX design to mean pretty much the same thing in these articles.Topics I'm planning to cover over the course of 2022, this list is subject to change:
The articles will become available as I finish them (most are at least in draft form).Everything I'll be sharing is the result of my own experiences designing and building complex software for the TV and film industry. It is my intention to try and show a path through the design process, documenting what I've learnt works from nearly a decade of toiling away in complex product design, along the way I'll also decant some insights from many illustrious academics and practitioners in the field of product design, including Barbara Mirel, Jeff Johnson, Austin Henderson, Bruce Tognizzini, Daniel Jackson and the late great Larry Tesla.
- What is a complex app?
- User and Task Analysis.
- Conceptual Models.
- Complexity Management.
- Workflow Design.
- Change Management.
- Information Architecture.
- Clarity and Context
- Interface Design
- Evaluating your app’s usability.
- The wrong tools for the job: Why user personas, user stories, high-fidelity mockups and journey maps are not optimal techniques for complex app design.
The articles will become available as I finish them (most are at least in draft form).Everything I'll be sharing is the result of my own experiences designing and building complex software for the TV and film industry. It is my intention to try and show a path through the design process, documenting what I've learnt works from nearly a decade of toiling away in complex product design, along the way I'll also decant some insights from many illustrious academics and practitioners in the field of product design, including Barbara Mirel, Jeff Johnson, Austin Henderson, Bruce Tognizzini, Daniel Jackson and the late great Larry Tesla.
About the examples
About the examples
Over the course of this guide I'll be showing screen recordings of me using various different apps and websites, and this will not always be in the most flattering light, so I'd like to provide an explanation for why these bad user experiences may exist:
- It's impossible for us to know the internal politics that lead to what I consider to be a 'bad UX', e.g the loudest voice in the room or the most senior voice, rather than the most skilled may have won out.
- It may be a mistake.
- It may be unfinished.
- They may have opted to avoid doing the design work and instead just copied some other app that made the mistake.
- Budget/time may not have allowed for a polished product.
- It could just be good old fashioned incompetence.
- I may simply be wrong.
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