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How to design for troubleshooting when the user workflow isn’t clear
How do you design when there’s no set path users follow?
“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
- Alerts, at scale, need to be easily prioritized (or triaged) quickly
The first point is easily explained by looking at a car (or airplane) dashboard. If there’s an alert you need to pay attention to, the user can’t spend five seconds deciphering it while driving 60 miles an hour: that would result in a crash.
So many alerts often use universal signals (like a triangle with an exclamation point) and specific colors designed to stand out to the users and make them notice it.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work at scale. If you have 100 alerts designed with eye-catching colors and symbols, you will have users suffering from “alert fatigue.”
This is when users stop paying attention to alerts or don’t know what to do. Imagine you’re a…
