Designing interfaces that don't suck when your customers scale!

Customers come in all shapes and sizes. Some will use your products exactly as you intend while others will go way beyond your expectations. This is perfectly normal, possibly the price of success, but it can result in all kinds of problems that you didn't expect. Problems can range from terrible performance to usability issues where the user interface becomes useless. It can be surprising when a dashboard that looks great for ten records can be completely unusable when it displays a thousand records. This can be far more frustrating than a page that is simply slow to load.

Octopus Deploy, a friendly .NET deployment automation tool, has to contend with this problem. Some customers have a single project, and some have thousands. It's a challenge designing for everyone. This session is all about thinking about scale when building and designing the user interface of your apps and web sites. We’ll review the lessons learned from growing Octopus Deploy and offer actionable tips that you can apply on the projects you're building right now. Techniques and patterns to display empty state, one thing, some things and too many things. This is still a work in progress so you'll see the good, the bad and the ugly. The goal of this presentation is to help you design your apps so they work great for all your customers.

Presented at NDC Sydney 2017
https://ndcsydney.com/
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz2lCUQTDvA

Transcript

1. Designing Interfaces That Don't Suck When Your Customers Scale @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 1
2. Rob Pearson About me — Canuck and Aussie — Developer Designer — ❤ Product Development — ❤ Happy Customers — ❤ Apple Products — Work at Octopus Deploy @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 2
3. Have you ever used an app that becomes unusable once it scaled? @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 3
4. Agenda 1. Customers come in different sizes 2. Explore how to find problems in your apps 3. Designing Interfaces for too much data @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 4
5. 1. Customers come in different sizes @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 5
6. Small, Medium and Large @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney | Our designer Jessica Ross is awesome! 6
7. @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 7
8. @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 8
9. 2. How do you find problems in your apps @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 9
10. Listen and Learn - Talk to your customers (Customer support) - Walk through your own apps @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 10
11. Review your existing applications Nine states of design by Vince Speelman — None (Empty state) — One — Some — Too Many @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 11
12. 3. Designing interfaces for too much data @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 12
13. Approaches - Summarise/Aggregate - Divide and conquer @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 13
14. Dashboards @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 14
15. Data visualisation @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 15
16. Show pa!ern @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 16
17. Tables @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 17
18. Summary 1. Customers come in different sizes 2. Explore how to find problems in your apps 3. Designing Interfaces for too much data @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 18
19. Thank you! @robpearson | octopus.com | #ndcsydney 19