Complex web design is an overlooked opportunity that needs designers
How to design when the content is often overwhelming
“Is your head overflowing with information? Don’t worry: it’s simpler than it seems,” I told my new hire, only to realize someone told me those same words when I started.
I recently read Matej Latin's Designer Engagement Report, which highlighted the top problems most designers were facing this year. However, many of the problems designers complained about weren’t what I faced.
This is because I work in Healthcare UX, “The Other UX Design”. Healthcare, along with fields like FinTech, Cybersecurity, and Federal/Enterprise UX, are what I’d call Complex Web Design.
These problems are messy and require much time and effort to learn and understand, but they are probably one of the safest design career paths.
This is for one key reason: getting your second job in the field becomes much easier. When businesses see a candidate who probably understands their domain and has gone through the learning process, they realize you can probably hit the ground running.
This automatically gives you a competitive edge and can provide you with ‘career security’ in this otherwise turbulent time for designers.
So, if you want to enter the steady world of complex web design, here’s what you need to know.
You don’t need to know everything, but knowing something helps
When working in such fields, I noticed that some of my colleagues would never really engage with the content.
Rather than trying to understand some specific concept or terminology, they would say this field is “Sample Name,” which has “Sample Interaction.”
I’ve never been the biggest fan of lorem ipsum since it often leads to content-last design. However, this point is often magnified when you work in complex web design.
The reason is simple: Lorem Ipsum gets your team to skip over content in favor of the visual design. When most of the value users will get is from content and design interactions with it, skipping over content can be disastrous.
Of course, forcing yourself to learn too much about a subject can be intimidating. So, what I’ve found to work best is to find 1–2 good examples to include in your design.
Finding sample data to plug into your designs often forces your team to look at it and may raise questions at an early enough stage.
For example, you might list only 3 Rules here, only to be told by a Product Manager that they were expecting 20 options, which would fundamentally change the design. Making the content visible and asking questions about it is a surefire way to tackle what you don’t know about a subject.
Luckily, we have a powerful tool at our disposal: ChatGPT.
ChatGPT has been a game changer in complex web design
Whether you need to generate some sample data to fit into your design or don’t understand certain concepts or acronyms, ChatGPT is a powerful tool for working on Complex Web Design.
What used to require digging around on message boards or more (to find actual sample data) is now easily generated by AI, which can be verified by additional Google searches or with your team.
The best approach to this is to take a keyword-based approach. When you’re in meetings, listen for certain terms or keywords that your team brings up.
For example, perhaps I’ve heard the term “Drug Interdependency” when it comes to cancer treatment. I can ask ChatGPT about this and get a simple idea of this topic.
In this case, there are concepts around multiple drugs either working well together, not working well together, or other sorts of considerations (like needing to take certain drugs in an order).
When we do that, we can ask an all-important design question: “What does my design need to show or allow users to do?”
From what I understand, the design problem is to show that the drugs chosen work well (or don’t work well) together.
Phrasing a design problem like that makes it much easier to work with and is a necessary part of working on Complex Web Design.
However, you must also be aware of another mindset shift or change: always thinking about outcomes.
Because these fields are complex, focus on outcomes
Say you’re working as part of a five-year federal cybersecurity project to revise a huge legacy system. You only stay at this job for 2 years, so you might not be around either for the kick-off or the completion.
How do you explain what you did in this project to recruiters? This is a common problem in complex fields that must always be considered. Projects that get messy often take much longer to uncover and fix (I once had six-week sprints!).
In addition, you may be talking to recruiters who know little about the field. As a result, you must try not to bore them by overexplaining the context.
This is why it is useful to remember one mantra, recommended by Google Recruiters: I accomplished [X], as measured by [Y], by doing [Z].
Sometimes, answering this question might be a bit fuzzy. In our example above, we might say, “I accomplished improving the product’s Usability, measured by the System Usability Score, by re-designing the workflow process and testing with users.”
Ideally, you’d want to measure it through a Product Metric (like Daily Active Users or something similar), but if the product has not been released to the public yet, it may be difficult to gather this data.
Being able to speak to what you did throughout a project can keep you honest about your design efforts and how to explain them, even if you find yourself plunging into the deep end. This is the key skill you must learn when working on complex web design.
Complex web design requires clarity, most of all.
While I may work in Healthcare UX, I will never be a medical professional. While it’s good for me to know the basics about how doctors will work in this application, it’s equally important that I understand enough to rely on my design training.
This is at the heart of any complex web design. From designing applications to map out clinical pathways to explaining legal terminology to senior citizens, the most important thing for me is understanding the primary problem users face.
Once you develop that skill, not only will it make complex web design easier to understand, but you’ll also be able to find specialized jobs in this field that provide steady design career advancement.
So, if you want to seek out a steady (and often overlooked) opportunity that often desperately needs UX Designers, try to break into complex web design.
It is much less intimidating than you might think.
I’ve revamped my Maven course to teach Data Informed Design. If you want to learn this valuable skill, consider joining the waitlist.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and creator of the Data and Design newsletter. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.