Designing Complex Apps & Websites

Applications and websites that require users to perform complex tasks or act on large data sets pose special design challenges. Examples of these user experiences are everywhere: supply chain, retail, the Internet of Things, healthcare, compensation management, process mapping, configuration and pricing, scientific computing, web analytics, B2B marketplaces, and more.

Creating experiences for end-users who engage in complex problem-solving requires an approach that’s different from traditional user-centered design (UCD) methods. Complex systems bring special challenges to the user experience with respect to product discovery, information architecture, interaction design, navigation, user research, content and terminology, and visual design.

In this course, we explore methods, best practices and more than 40 interaction patterns geared toward complex applications and websites. You’ll also learn new techniques for understanding and mapping expert users’ conceptual models and alternative ways to communicate designs.

• UX & interaction designers
• UI & front-end developers
• Information architects
• Product managers
• Business analysts
• Visual designers
• User researchers
• Usability specialists
• Executive management with oversight responsibility
  

• Which user experiences require complex problem-solving
• Strategies for ensuring alignment with business stakeholders
• How product management, UX design, user research and development can work together to avoid building the wrong beautiful thing
• Why traditional personas fall short for domain-expert users and what to do instead
• Mapping domain-expert users’ conceptual models
• Usefulness and usability
• Valuable, practical insights into prototyping and usability testing
• Challenges and solutions related to information architecture, navigation and interaction design in complex applications and sites
• Conducting rapid design research with domain-expert users
• Transforming user research data into designs
• Interaction design patterns geared toward managing large data sets and streamlining complex user tasks (for example, many flavors of searching and filtering, plus ways to visualize data)
• How to apply, manage and organize interaction patterns in the design process
• How to improve upon traditional design communication methods (because they don’t work in these cases)
• Business cases and ROI for using or enhancing interaction patterns
• Tips for making your content and terminology more useful and usable
• Visual design for data-rich environments