As I’m getting involved with more complex design projects at my company, I researched how other UI/UX-ers are going about designing for large enterprise apps.
It’s Easy to Over Design
The more I find myself designing applications, the more I start to understand this famous quote:
It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
– Antoine de Saint Exupery
When presented with a new project that has multiple purposes and performs complex tasks, it’s very easy to start designing things for every instance of the task that you feel is important. What you end up with is just that, things. Things that the user will be overwhelmed with and therefore remove any sort of value your app could possibly give to them.
So how does a designer go about designing a complex application with tons of functionality in a minimal, effective yet unique way?
Research. Research. RESEARCH!
After wondering about the projects on my agile board, I was overwhelmed by the mountain of possible screens I’d have to design for. I kept thinking to myself there has to be a way to go about designing huge enterprise apps in an efficient way. Alas, I was correct. Turns out that there’s plenty of articles out there from more experienced designers discussing this very topic.
Some of the main points I pulled from the article linked above are:
- Come up with a simple, high-level user story that describes the purpose of the app.
- Break down the high-level user story into smaller task sized stories
- Eliminate user stories that don’t truly provide value to your users
- Whiteboard task flows and watch the user stories start to gel
If you want to learn more about designing for complex apps here are some helpful articles:
- Better Designs for Complex Apps – InvisionApp
- UI & UX Design for Comlex Apps – ProWebDesign
- Designing Complex Applications – StackExchange | UX
- Apply Minimalism to Complex Designs – Shockoe
