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

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 Scale Conf New Zealand 2017
http://www.scaleconf.co.nz

Rob Pearson

August 10, 2017
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Transcript

  1. Rob Pearson About me — Canuck — Aussie — Developer

    — ❤ Product Development — ❤ Happy Customers — ❤ Apple Products — Octopus Deploy by day — Side Projects by night @robpearson | octopus.com | #SConfNZ 2
  2. Have you ever used an app that becomes unusable once

    it scaled? @robpearson | octopus.com | #SConfNZ 3
  3. 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 | #SConfNZ 6
  4. Small, Medium and Large @robpearson | octopus.com | #SConfNZ |

    Our designer Jessica Ross is awesome! 8
  5. Listen and Learn - Talk to your customers (Customer support)

    - Walk through your own apps @robpearson | octopus.com | #SConfNZ 12
  6. Review your existing applications Nine states of design by Vince

    Speelman — None (Empty state) — One — Some — Too Many @robpearson | octopus.com | #SConfNZ 13
  7. Approaches — Dashboards — Data Visualization — Seek pattern —

    Show pattern — 'Sticky' user interfaces — Tables @robpearson | octopus.com | #SConfNZ 16
  8. Tip: Ask yourself - What are your users trying to

    achieve? @robpearson | octopus.com | #SConfNZ 17
  9. 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 | #SConfNZ 29