A complex software application often involves multiple personas, several user journeys, and complicated interactions between different user groups. Without a thoughtful design, these complexities can be overwhelming and frustrating: Users are forced to deal with a cluttered UI with overloaded features, or to search for an obscure button or command, or to figure out a user flow that’s hard for laymen to understand. As a result, they get lost while using the software and are forced to seek help or go through trainings.
Instead of forcing the users to learn and adapt, how can we design an application in such as way that it proactively tries to help the users? Well, one way to do that is to predict the user intent using various contextual cues, such as the user’s skill level, the content the user is working on, etc, and present the right features at the right stage of the user journey through an adaptive UI.
Intelligently Adaptive
It’s not hard to come across some basic form of adaptiveness in the UIs of many existing applications. We saw earlier versions of Windows or Office automatically hide rarely used features in their menus. We saw Adobe applications such as Photoshop or Premiere offer users the possibility to switch between different UI presets designed for different personas or use cases. We also saw the the side panel in Pages or Keynote change based on the element being edited. I believe we can take this idea even further.
For instance, when a user begins using the application for the first time, she’s a novice, and there’s little interesting data from the database to show. The complex application probably also needs input from the user to be properly configured. Instead of showing an empty state and waiting for the user to figure things out, help her onboard: show her the quick actions that she needs to take to properly set up the software; tell her what the application has to offer by showing her video tutorials or links to those tutorials.
After the application is set up and the user onboard, the needs and goals of the user start to shift towards creating and editing data…
