This publication was originally posted on my previous iteration of the blog
While I was writing about complex systems before, this is my first post in English, and I think it is important to start from the basic reasons behind this project — why I consider professional or complex systems as those that require a specific UX design approach. Of course, the UX process is probably 80 percent or even more the same as when we make an e-commerce website or any other digital product, but there are very important aspects that make it different.
What are the systems we are going to touch?
Because the whole topic may sound a bit abstract, let’s start with examples, because the definition of “complex” or “professional” system is pretty vague.
Most of my future publications are going to be dedicated to systems like:
- Onboard systems of the ships, including ECDIS (nautical charts), ARPA systems (radars), or airplane cockpit systems, etc.
- Instrumental systems, or simply editors, like Ableton Live, CAD software, text processors, etc. Even the Figma tool, Adobe Illustrator, or Procreate are examples of such instrumental systems.
- Multiple informational systems, including hospital management, financial, corporate, warehouse management, or other applications that deal with data, business processes, user roles, access rights, and so on.
- Monitoring systems (like SCADA) that control the state of large industrial objects (like power plants) and infrastructure (like air traffic, power grid, oil and gas pipelines).
- Embedded systems and various equipment, like X-ray and surgery machines, airplane cockpits, even bulldozers’ cabins, or more mass-market stuff like music mixers, MIDI-controllers and synthesizers — all the stuff that combines digital and hardware controls for specific tasks.
So, what is specific to the systems?
As we can see, these systems are very different, but they all have plenty of common features:
- Complex subject domain (like music making, navigation, engineering, or medicine)
- Complex workflows and data structures
- Control or monitoring in real time of a great variety of parameters
- Quite often, they do not have a very casual operational environment, which can differ from the comfortable conditions of home or office — dirty (or, opposite, sterile) areas, vibrations, night or direct sunlight conditions, etc.
- Going beyond typical controls or visualizations, like maps, weather visualizations, music sequence timelines, or HMI panels, and other combinations of physical and digital worlds.
And as you can see, even mass applications may be very complex or demanding because of such contexts, like a smartphone car navigational application, or a modern semi-professional mirrorless camera. And dealing with the limitations of tiny display and hardware buttons of action video camera is much closer to the task of organizing the layout of radar hardware controls than to the web design of social network or corporate website.
Does it mean a specific design process?
As I mentioned in the beginning, the design process is pretty universal both for mass systems and for complex systems. But the specifics that I mentioned above require a change of focus.
For instance, these systems require more functional approach, while emotional and aesthetical factors are less important — the captain of the vessel doesn’t care much if the buttons are rounded or with sharp corners, if they are skeuomorphic or flat, but it is more important for him/her that the UI is not too much cluttered, that the buttons and information is logically grouped, and that all important features are available by hand.
In my opinion, this is the most important difference, which makes the design of such systems a bit closer to usability and traditional human factors and ergonomics, and also requires a lot of conceptual activities to make large-scale (and detailed) decisions on how to organize complex data and workflows consistently.
But many other specific things require attention during the design process:
- Engineering factors are very crucial for these systems because they affect and limit the opportunities of the UX designer. If some process (like processing or collection of the data) is affected by algorithms, sensors capabilities or simply price and limitations of satellite internet-providers (Elon Mask’s Starlink is a game-changer, but still not so widespread to stop worrying about bandwidth and price of data), it is very important to find the best possible solution based on the deep understanding of these factors.
- Safety and minimizing potential damage are quite often the case for such systems that operate vessels, aircraft, or power infrastructure. It demands more attention to edge cases, even very rare ones. Maybe you’ve heard how usability issues affected nuclear incidents, led to deaths of patients, and so on in the past, but it still occurs nowadays. Luckily, multiple regulations minimize the damage, but the requirements for specific systems are often very complicated and require a lot of brain effort to implement them in a particular application, and keep it innovative and modern.
- Domain-specific knowledge that sometimes requires years of education is also an important thing, which creates serious gaps and estrangement barriers between designers, developers, and the system and its users. It is much easier to start making something like an e-commerce website than an aircraft collision avoidance system HMI, just because most of us (and not just designers) have experience with e-commerce, and probably no one knows what the ideas and principles behind aircraft traffic control and collision avoidance are. And work with such systems requires being both a designer, an analyst, a domain expert, and a communicator — if we don’t want just to be operators of Figma who passively draw the rectangles and text labels.
Many other things make this work specific and unique while I can’t say that mass-market UX design is simple (that is why I personally don’t fully like the words “complex” or “professional”, but I can’t find any better terms) — they are just different, like the game design differs from apps design, marketing design differs from advertisement design, or like Hollywood movies differ from Youtube videos that get millions of views.
And I personally consider it a very interesting and underestimated topic, which is worth getting more attention in the UX industry. I hope we will discuss these and other things later.
Let’s keep in touch!