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Complex web design is an overlooked opportunity that needs designers

Kai Wong
UX Collective
Published in
6 min readJun 11, 2024

A person looking at a huge tangle of knots and complex wires that are hanging from the ceiling.
Art by midjourney

“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.”

A table which has a “Sample Name” title and a “Sample description” for all rows of its’ data.
A “Sample name” table

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…

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Written by Kai Wong

7xTop writer in UX Design. UX, Data Viz, and Data. Author of Data-Informed UX Design: https://tinyurl.com/2p83hkav. Substack: https://dataanddesign.substack.com

I'm working with dashboards for mining and processing industries and I'd like to agree a thousand times to not using Lorem Ipsum for complex subject areas. Content examples mean a lot!
(and ChatGPT is really good at making up good examples)

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I work in with government products and this article really speaks to me! I agree it's so important to get clarity, when processes are complex and can be long drawn. Thanks for sharing this Kai!

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