Designing in a complex and technical domain? Try this.
Dissect, discover, delight — repeat.
This article is a collaboration between Peter Vachon, Cognitive Design Principal at IBM Security and Tina L. Zeng, UX Designer at IBM Security.
We’re seeing an influx of designers entering complex domains like healthcare, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity — all domains that require deep subject matter expertise.
At IBM Security, we’ve developed a framework to help us work through the complexity. It’s based on this principle:
Designers need to first follow common UX patterns to meet user expectations then focus on domain-specific use cases to create delightful signature moments.
In this article, we’re going to walk through our framework of dissecting complex workflows, discovering common patterns, and designing delightful signature moments users will love.
Breaking down complex workflows into familiar experiences
Let’s be real — sh!t can get overwhelming when you’re a designer in a very complex and technical space. Cybersecurity is definitely one of them. Cryptic security threat names like Sodinokibi and WannaCry, IP addresses, STIX, SHA-256 hashes, and the MITRE ATT&CK Framework… all very intimidating.
So how can you work through all that technical complexity?
Reframe your process by breaking down workflows into simple experiences and uncover familiar patterns that users typically interact with on a daily basis.
For example, at IBM Security, one of our primary users are security analysts. Much like a detective working a case, these analysts conduct investigations to identify and remediate potential threats within their company. They gather evidence, make correlations, provide hypotheses, create and perform tasks, invite teammates to collaborate and more.
Here’s how we employed this process and designed a signature moment for our security analysts when conducting investigations. Our example focuses on analysts needing to write and document their findings during investigations.
1. Dissect workflows and identify patterns agnostic to your domain
Regardless of how complex your domain is, your user experience is probably a symphony of common user needs like searching, filtering, sharing, creating, deleting and more. Though the data and systems that make up these workflows are domain-specific, many of the interaction patterns are fairly common in other products.
Start your design process by identifying primary user needs and workflows agnostic to your domain with a focus on the underlying intent and associated interactions.
In our security investigations example, we needed to first meet users’ expectations by adopting common patterns for a ‘note-taking’ experience before pinpointing a domain-specific need for a signature moment.
2. Discover ‘like’ patterns in the wild
Once we got to the core of the user need (note-taking), we began to look for familiar (internal and external) patterns that users might typically interact with on a daily basis by conducting a UX audit.
Because you’re a designer in a complex and technical domain, you’re not designing for everyone — except you are.
The same users that are administering clinical trials or investigating a case of a potential malware infection are the same users that leverage Gmail to send an email or Notes on their iPhone to jot down a quick note.
Remembering that Jakob’s Law, still applies to your product is critical to setting up your users for success.
One tactical way to do this is to be aware of the UX patterns of everyday applications that people use. Can they apply to the workflows and user needs you’ve identified? The patterns that work the best are often invisible and unnoticeable because they meet our expectations of how technology should work.
By following these familiar patterns you’ll reduce cognitive load and avoid having to teach your users a new and different pattern.
Through this approach, you’ll start building up an internal library of patterns and interactions to reference throughout your career, whether that be used to give feedback in critiques or help you in your product design process regardless of the domain.
Remember: It’s okay to deviate, as long as it is necessary.
Pro Tip: Build your library of common UX patterns by taking a second look. It’s easy to identify when things go wrong, but what about when things go right? Every once in a while, take note of why that is and break down the elements that may make up the experience.
3. Delight users with signature moments
Once you’ve mapped the primary user need to the common UX pattern, you can quickly focus your time on innovating for your specific domain to design that delightful signature moment.
This is the time to dive back deep into your domain and bring the focus back to your user and their job at hand.
Explore how you can enhance the user experience through addressing secondary and tertiary user needs or pain points to achieve delight.
In our example, security analysts paste links or security-specific data, called indicators, like IP address or SHA-246 file hashes. Through research, we know that analysts collaborate with one another and rely on each other’s documentation to get up to speed with the investigation. Their secondary need is to quickly scan and then identify the important pieces of information in their colleague’s notes — most often they are indicators.
This revealed an opportunity to provide a signature moment: automatically flagging indicators and enabling the addition of external threat intelligence information. This signature moment would save our users time by visually highlighting the indicators and then providing them quick access to indicator information that would normally take navigating to a multitude of other products to uncover.
Dissect, discover, delight — repeat.
Work through the complexity of your domain using this framework:
- Dissect workflows and identify patterns agnostic to your domain
- Discover ‘like’ patterns in the wild
- Delight users with signature moments
This article is the first of a series that the designers at IBM Security will be publishing about this framework. In the meantime, let us know if you’ve applied this framework by sending a note to pavachon@us.ibm.com.
Huge thanks and hugs to Haidy Francis, Katie Orenstein, and Brady Starr for their feedback. Visuals by Peter Vachon.
Peter Vachon is a Cognitive Design Principal at IBM Security, and Tina L. Zeng is a UX Designer at IBM Security. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
