Designing Complex Applications and Websites 1
Lynn Pausic
John Morkes
Full-Day Tutorial
Applications and websites that require users to sift through and act on rich data sets to
accomplish their tasks pose special user interface challenges. Examples of these user experiences
are everywhere: call centers, compensation management, process mapping, configuration and pricing,
supply chain, content-heavy e-commerce, Web analytics, B2B marketplaces, and more.
Creating user experiences for end-users who engage in complex problem-solving requires an approach
that’s different from traditional user-centered design (UCD) methods. In this course, we’ll explore
methods and more than 25 interaction design patterns geared toward these complex problem-solving activities.
What You’ll Learn
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
- Identify user experiences that require complex problem-solving
- Understand and design for the unique domain-expert user audience
- Modify UCD methods for complex applications and websites
- Examine the important distinction between usefulness and usability
- Identify interaction design patterns geared toward managing large data sets and complex problem-solving activities
- Apply interaction design patterns
Course Outline
Defining the problem space
- What makes an application or website complex?
- Examples of complex problem-solving
A unique user audience
- Who does complex problem-solving tasks?
- How are complex problem-solving tasks unique?
- Identifying and overcoming barriers to use
Requirement and UCD pitfalls
- Where requirements and definition processes fall short
- Why use cases and personas don’t work
- Tuning up UCD methods and artifacts
- Capturing persona data for domain-expert users
- Use cases for complex problem-solving tasks
- Prioritizing for usefulness versus usability (in some situations, usefulness trumps usability)
Designing for complex tasks
- How designers and developers can impact the usefulness of an application or website
- Conducting rapid design research
- Research techniques for the definition phase (interviews, observation, surveys, focus groups, etc.)
- Recruiting domain-expert users
- Case study on design research:
- Forming the design hypothesis, choosing prototyping and testing methods
- Usefulness testing and remote testing
- Interaction design patterns for expediting prototyping and improving communication
- Interaction design patterns for complex situations:
- Displaying large data sets
- Searching, filtering and sorting
- Bloated hierarchy alternatives
- Displaying metadata
- Tables
Business case for using patterns
- Establishing user experience metrics for your application or website
- ROI on implementing a pattern approach to design and development
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lecture, real-world examples, exercises, Q&A and discussion throughout.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend?
This course is intended for people engaged in designing, defining or testing user experiences for complex applications and websites. This includes information architects, interaction designers, visual designers, usability specialists, user researchers, technical writers, product managers, business analysts, UI developers, and managers of these disciplines.
See Also:
This course is a companion to Designing Complex Applications & Websites 2 and
Designing Complex Applications & Websites 3. To learn the topic in depth, we recommend that you attend
all three days, but each is structured to offer a valuable single-day experience.
Instructors
Lynn Pausic is Co-Founder and Principal at Expero Inc., a consulting firm
specializing in the definition, design and usability of user experiences for complex
applications and websites. Lynn leads the User Experience Design practice at Expero. Lynn has
worked with companies of all sizes from many industries to design hundreds of successful user
experiences. Recent clients include Digital Globe, Charles Schwab, Freescale Semiconductor,
GSI Commerce, Intel, Monotype Imaging and Servigistics. Previously, Lynn was the Director of
Product Management for 2Vox, an early-stage company focused on wireless security and provisioning.
Lynn has also worked as a Director of Human-Computer Interaction, a Senior Interaction Designer,
and a Consulting Manager. Lynn has spoken on various topics related to user experience and
design in many forums and professional seminars, such as Carnegie Mellon University’s
HCI Institute, Cornell University’s Media Lab and ACM’s SIG-CHI conference.
Lynn holds a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. Lynn has presented tutorials at Nielsen
Norman Group conferences since 2006.
John Morkes is Co-Founder and Principal at Expero Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the
definition, design and usability of user experiences for complex applications and websites. Morkes
leads the User Research and Usability group at Expero. His recent clients include eBay, Fonts.com,
Intel, Sprint Nextel, TiVo and the Greek Ministry of Economy and Finance. Previously, he was the
Director of Human-Computer Interaction at Trilogy Software, where he led efforts to improve the
usability of configurator-driven websites for Nissan and Ford, which Forrester Research rated as
the two best consumer sites in the industry. Morkes has worked as a usability engineer for Sun and HP
and as a journalist for Wired and R&D Magazine. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University and
master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Northwestern University. He has presented tutorials
at Nielsen Norman Group conferences since 2000.
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