About
Hello all, my name's Ian Waters and I'm the person behind this Complex UX (CxUX) guide. I decided to create this resource as there is so very little in the way of literature on this subject with the last book being written nearly 20 years ago.Briefly, my backstory is that after studying interaction design, I got a job as an animator, before moving into the design and development of animation software, a task I have been performing for over 10 years now. For around the first 5 years of this I was using traditional UX techniques of the kind I was taught at university, however, I was frequently finding that creatives were using the various peices of software I created for purposes I was not designing them for, and that, amongst other issues, the software was becoming harder to use the more features I added, this then lead to me over simplifying certain things in the persute of ease of use. That said, overall everything was sucsessful, one bit of software was even aquired, and to o-so humbly brag, created enough ripples in the industry to result in me being flown out to LA to give a presentation at the Academy, with a Scientific and Techical Achievement (Sci-Tech) Oscar in the offing. I didn't bring home the Oscar, the Adobe After Effects team did (thoroughly well deserved), but the whole experience was a definite highlight of my career thus far.
Around 5 years ago a natural break occurred and I decided to brush up on UX research papers feeling that I was very much missing something when it came to how one should approach creating complex, non-linear software. Over the course of reading a hundred or so papers on holiday (yikes), I discovered a reference to a book by Barbara Mirel with the catchy title Interaction Design for Complex Problem Solving: Developing Useful and Usable Software. This sounded like a book written for exactly the kind of work I was doing, I snaffled it up, gave it a read, and went down a rabbit hole of related topics and subjects before ending up with a whole new philosophy for my approach to product design. I then spent the next 5 years designing complex software with a much improved approach, learning a frankly embarrassing number of lessons along the way. The site is my attempt to fill the void of information that exists on the distinct topic of CxUX by sharing much of what I've learned; in essence, it's the guide I wish I had access to years ago.As a final word, it is my intention that this site will grow over time as I expand pages and add new ones.I hope you find it useful.Feel free to email me with thoughts, corrections and questions.All header graphics were created in Cavalry.Last updated June 2022.