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How to design for troubleshooting when the user workflow isn’t clear

Kai Wong
UX Collective
Published in
6 min readFeb 11, 2025

A man looking inside the car hood with a flashlight trying to diagnose what’s happening.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-black-jacket-and-black-knit-cap-inspecting-car-engine-3807277/

“If only it was always this easy.” My manager said after listening to a presentation solving a simple problem.

In domains like B2B/SaaS or Healthcare UX, you don’t tackle straightforward problems. In many cases, you’re unsure what the user does to solve the problem since every case differs.

Whether troubleshooting a network or finding the proper treatment among hundreds of options, it can be tricky to understand how to help users troubleshoot.

To understand why, let’s consider a common troubleshooting scenario around alerts.

Alerts or user problems at scale

At first, designing alerts seems pretty straightforward. All you need to do is create a layout showing as much information as possible to clarify what the user should do next.

Except, that’s not what the real challenges are. That might be okay if you only design a single alert for a page.

But there are two significant problems with alerts that are often contradictory:

  • Alerts need to be immediately understood at a glance

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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

Responses (1)

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One thing that feels missing is how to handle user frustration when they still can't find a clear solution. Do you think adding guided troubleshooting steps or AI-powered suggestions could help?