Applications supporting broad, unstructured goals or nonlinear workflows

Designing complex applications to support domain-specific workflows presents unique challenges as compared to designing applications for broad audiences and generalist domains.

Often, these complex apps must:

• Support highly-trained users with specialised knowledge
• Help users navigate and manage large underlying data sets
• Enable advanced decision making and complex interactions
• Mitigate the risks of executing high-impact (or high-value) tasks

When working on complex apps it’s important to work well together with work-domain experts. They are potential end users with direct work-domain experience, or people with extensive secondary knowledge of the work-domain.

One problem of designing complex apps is that it’s difficult to use them properly. And as a UX designer that’s the best way to really understand how to improve them.