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 specific UX design approach. Of course, the UX process is probably 80 percent or even more the same as when we make 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 all the topic may sound a big abstract, let’s start with examples, because the definition of “complex” or “professional” system is pretty vague.
Most of this blog is going to be dedicated to the 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 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 in 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)
- Complex workflows and data structures
- Control or monitoring in real time of a great variety of parameters
- Quite often, they have not very casual operational environment, that can differ from the comfortable conditions of home or office — dirty (or, opposite, sterile) areas, vibrations, night or direct sun light 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 smartphone car navigational application, or modern semi-professional mirrorless camera. And dealing with limations of tiny display and hardware buttons of action video camera is much closer to the to the task of organizing layout of radar hardware controls than to the web design of social network or corporate website.
Does it mean specific design process?
As I said in the beginning, the design process is pretty universal both for mass systems and for complex systems. But specifics that I mentioned above, requires change of the 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, that makes design of such a 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 how to organize complex data and workflows in a consistent way.
But there are many other specific things that require attention during design process:
- Engineering factors are very crucial for these systems, because they affect and limit the opportunities of 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 is quite often the case for such systems that operate vessels, aircrafts or power infrastructure. It demands more attention to edge cases, even very rare ones. Maybe you’ve heard how usability issues affected nuclear incidents, leaded to deaths of patients and so on in the past, but it still occurs nowadays. Luckily, there are multiple regulations that minimize the damage, but the requirements to specific systems are often very complicated and require a lot of brain efforts to implement them in particular application — and keep it innovative and modern.
- Domain specific knowledge that sometimes require years of education is also important thing, that creates serious gaps and estrangement barriers between designers, developers and the system and its users. It is much easier to start making something like e-commerce website than 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 are the ideas and principles behind aircrafts traffic control and collision avoidance. And work with such systems requires to be both designer, analyst, domain expert and communicator — if we don’t want just to be operators of Figma who passively draw the rectangles and text labels.
There are many other things that make this work specific and unique while I can’t say that more mass market UX design is simple (that is why I personally don’t fully like the words “complex” or “professional”, but sadly I can’t find anything better) — 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 as a very interesting and underestimated topic, that is worth to get more attention. I hope we will discuss all these and other things in this blog and other parts of Protraktor later.
Let’s keep in touch!