1. Hello
@lextant

2. Designing for Complexity
What did I get myself into?!
@lextant

3. Why is Designing for
Complex Systems Difficult?

4. We buy our own insurance online, we book my own flights, we manage
our own finances on our phone. But we’ve never given someone an MRI
before. Learning that domain is a bit harder, and takes more time.
The stakes might be higher – you’re designing something that people use
to do their jobs, or to make sense of large sets of information in order to
make critical decisions.
You don’t have a mental model for the system. You likely have never
used something like this before, and don’t have a frame of reference and
aren’t familiar with the goals that users have.
You might not have that understanding yet, but you will.

5.  Don’t an Understanding
 Build Freak Out

6. You have the skills and the know-
how to do this!
LEAN ON YOUR TEAM, talk it through with them.
Some of our best work is done when working with a
design partner.

7. EMOTIONS 1 2 BENEFITS
3 FEATURES
4 ATTRIBUTES
 Anatomy of an
The Thing
is not THE THING
Ideal Experience™

8. You have to focus less on the tool, and more on the goal that the tool is meant
to enable. It IS about how we make people feel, and creating an emotional
experience for them.
Your design lives in the real world – start to understand what situations,
behaviors, emotions it exists with. Understanding these larger goals can be
just as important as considering specific features.
You have to understand a user’s story. Know the kinds of decisions they will
need to make. Know what they need in order to make those decisions. Know
how they want to feel. So, how do we do that?

9.  Build an Understanding
 Build Understanding

10. Our best work is informed by user research, and a deep understanding
of goals that users have (both in and out of a system), and the emotional
drivers behind those.
Start with the questions that we have about people and their experiences.
Do we have questions about the ecosystem of people
and services? Or about their mental model of an experience?
When you’ve done this research, you’ll have built understanding about
users’ work processes and goals. From that, you’ll find patterns and
themes to provide you with the framework for a design solution.
But you’re not done!

11.  Keep Building an
Understanding

12. Design is how you begin to understand it for yourself, and
uncover more questions that give you deeper understanding.
You may have questions that your team didn’t anticipate at the
beginning. Maybe you have older research, and some new user
goals need to be accounted for.
Research doesn’t just end when design
begins. THE LINE IS FUZZY.
Keep asking questions. Admit what you know and especially
what you don’t know.

13. For the things you don’t know,
what do you do?
Start with doing some insight mining to extract all the knowledge
that can get locked up in organizations.
Reach out to your subject-matter experts, to the sales teams,
to the support teams.
Your IA is going to force you to inventory all of these sources of
information to understand how they all fit. Make sure that you’re
working with blueprints of the experience instead of pushing pixels.

14. Take advantage of being a layman.
Our role as designers is to ask
the questions that others are
afraid to ask.
JUST DO SOMETHING! Getting a reaction gets you closer
to an answer. Just trying something and beginning an iterative
process is a kind of research, and a good way to build up from your
base level of understanding.

15.  Build an Understanding
 Zoom Out

16. Don’t be afraid of going back to
the drawing board.
Allow yourself to step back and think at a more architectural or
structural level, and use that process as a tool to bring the goals and
needs of a user to life in a tangible way.
The risk that you take in trying to make something
fit is greater than just taking a step back.
Taking a fresh look at the architecture or thinking about the structure
in a new way might just be the thing that you need to see things in a
new light. It doesn’t mean that you are starting over.

17. “Test early and often” is extra important when
working on complex systems. While we have learned a lot about
the goals of people using these complex systems, we aren’t
experts in the field yet so user testing and concept evaluation is
critical to making sure that the right information is represented
at the right time.

18.  Build an Understanding
In Conclusion . . .

19. If it is done right, there isn’t an end to
the process. Know that it doesn’t end with you – it moves on
through development, then out to users.
Step back to see if your next project can help solve some of the
needs that were out of scope for your primary effort.
When you find yourself saying,
“What did I get myself into?!”
Remember that it isn’t about the thing. Your goal is to craft a
desired experience that lets people focus on what’s important
to them and help them accomplish their goals.

20. THANK YOU
:-)
jbailey@lextant.com I cpennell@lextant.com
@lextant