I love to design complex products. It’s exciting and challenging for me to make product design for complex products with an unfamiliar domain.

Initially, I designed simple products, and the first time I worked on a complex system, I had a problem because nobody explained the product and domain well to me. I didn’t realize the importance of studying the product and the domain, leading me to deliver poor design.

My experience designing a complex product inspired me to develop a clear guideline on how to study complex products and domains.

This guide will help designers who working on complex products for the first time and lead designers who want to build an onboarding process for the new joiners.

What are complex products?

A complex product is a product with many features, functions, flows, and many possible configurations. Usually, these are B2B apps that solve problems in a domain unfamiliar to most people. Some examples are Blender, Houdini, Docker, and Pycharm.

When do you need to study a new domain?

When you join a new company, move on to another product within the same company, or take on a new project, you’ll need to study and understand the domain, the product, and the users to deliver a good design.

What is an unfamiliar domain?

If you design a delivery app, the domain is deliveries. If you design an e-commerce app for the fashion industry, the domain is fashion. Both are easy to understand since most of us are familiar with these topics.

An unfamiliar domain is a field in which you have no background, for instance, Data analysis, Agriculture, wood industry. For that reason, you will have to learn much about the domain before you start to design to deliver the right solution to the user.

Take the initiative to study; other people will not do it for you

When you join a new company, you often have an onboarding process where people explain the product and the domain. Some companies don’t have a clear onboarding; they explain the product to a new team member in just one or two meetings.

Remember That in most cases, nobody will ask you

“Do you control the domain?”

“Do you understand the product?”

After some time in the company, people will want to see results, so make sure you know the product and domain well. People in the company should help you, but nothing will happen if you don’t push.

You’re the only one who owns your career.

The key is asking questions

You have to ask a lot of questions to study the domain and the product well. It’s because you don’t know what you don’t know. You’ll see your knowledge gaps when you ask questions, so you will understand what to ask and gradually gain confidence.

In the past, I worked with a dev lead who was not patient with my questions. So I asked the developers in the team; they had the same knowledge as him and were happy to answer my questions.

In every company, some people don’t have patience for questions, but don’t worry; you’ll always find friendly people who are willing to help.

How long does it take to study a complex product?

Studying and controlling a domain and product takes time. It depends on the domain and the complexity of the product, but I believe it should take more or less three months.

First, you need to learn the domain, which isn’t always easy since you’ll have to learn many new terms. Secondly, you must study the product, the users, and their needs. So be patient and focus on the process. With time you’ll get confident about all the aspects.

You should document all the information

Document everything you learn about the product and domain so you can go back to it and consult when needed. That’s good for one main reason:

You will be more independent.

You won’t understand everything people explain to you the first time, so you might ask the same question twice.

It’s not a big deal if it happens once. However, if you ask the same question repeatedly without writing the answer, you will depend on their knowledge, and they may find you annoying.

While writing answers to the questions is fine, I find it more beneficial to hold an online meeting with the people and record the meeting. So you don’t have to write anything and can see the visuals when people share their screens.

Avoid offline documents; write everything digitally. You’ll be able to find the information you need much easier that way. Moreover, when a new member joins your team, you can give them a link to the knowledge, and they will appreciate you.

How to study the domain

I recommend you study the new domain first so that when you start playing with the product, you’ll have a basic understanding of it. Here’s how to do it.

Product managers and product experts

Because product managers speak with users, understand the business, and analyze competitors, they deeply understand the domain. Ask them to meet with you so you can hear about it.

In some companies, product experts advise companies on the domain. If you have people like that in your company, talk to them. Many times they have presentations and other materials to explain the domain.

Keep in mind that other people in the company have info too. You can talk to people from design, customer success, sales, and the product development team.

Youtube videos

YouTube provides information about anything, so you will usually find basic or advanced information about the domain there.

Try looking at the competitors’ channels. Many times you will find material that explains the domain.

Google it

You can find information easily and quickly by searching on Google.

Join communities that discuss the domain

Join communities that talk about the domain. You can find them on Linkedin, Reddit, Facebook, Quora, etc. This will allow you to see what people talk about, gain knowledge and ask questions when needed.

Talk with users

Talking to users is one of the best ways to learn about a new domain. You can interview users to know them and identify knowledge gaps if you have a basic domain understanding.

As they will discuss many topics you don’t understand, you will be able to write these topics down and ask about them after. It is a very effective way to acquire knowledge.

Be aware that It is not always easy to perform this technique as it feels uncomfortable to see that you do not understand things, but keep at it, and you will gain understanding.

How to study the product

Once you understand the domain, you can study the product. As you explore the product and the domain, you’ll see that both help you to gain confidence.

Play with the product

Request permissions for the product, production, and development environment. To get started, play and touch everything and ask questions about everything.

When I say everything, I mean every process and every button. By understanding the product’s processes and features, as well as its design problems and bugs, you’ll have a better understanding and a lot more confidence.

It’s common for designers to study the product by looking at the Figma files, and that’s a mistake. Figma files are for planning, not for learning the product.

Look at the design materials

Knowing the user will help you understand the product because you will see how the users think, what they need, and how the product solves their problems.

User persona

Start by studying the user persona created by the design team or product manager. It’s pretty easy to understand because, most of the time, it’s one page with a bunch of helpful info.

If the user persona doesn’t exist, I suggest you conduct user research and create it. That way, you’ll know who the user is, what they want, and why they want it. Additionally, you can show it to the people who work with you and see if you and your team members have a shared understanding of the user.

User journey

Like the persona, the user journey is another excellent tool for studying the users. You can ask your team if it exists; if not, I’d suggest you create one to understand how and when the users interact with the product.

Usability tests

The product design team should have good documentation of their usability tests. By reading it, you can see what users like about the design and where the design has problems.

Get in touch with the sales department

Talking with the people from the sales department is a good way to learn about the product. They can provide you with information in 2 ways:

Take a look at the sales materials
As you read the sales material, you will see how the sales team sells it to the customers by showing them how the product addresses their pain points. Also, ask the salespeople if they have any videos they can share with you so you can watch them.

Join a demo session
You can join the sales team to see how they make demo the products to customers, which is a great way to learn about the product from both sides. Initially, the salesperson explains the product, but the most important thing is the questions users ask. The questions allow you to understand what users care about.

Contact customer success

Ask the people from the customer success team about the product. They can tell you how the product works and what the users think about it. Ultimately, their job is to help users, so they know a lot.

Check out YouTube videos of the competitors

There are a lot of companies that upload demos and videos about their products to YouTube (or another video platform). Check out these videos and learn a lot about the competitors’ products.

This will allow you to understand your product and the domain better.

Check out the products of your competitors

Many products offer a free trial, so you can play with them. Taking a look at their products and comparing them with your product will be very beneficial to you.

Learn about the history of the product

Discuss the product’s history with people at the company
Talk to the company’s people about the product’s history, how it started, what the vision was, if it changed, what errors they made, when they realized they had a product market fit, etc.

Check out the Jira and Confluence archives

You can learn a lot about the features and the team's design decisions by reading the Jira tickets. In addition, Confluence is a great place to cover gaps in knowledge about the product and the product development culture since you can read the meeting notes.

Read the design system documentation

Take the time to read and understand the design system documentation. It will teach you more about the product and its visual design.

Look through the Figma files

Look at the Figma files, open them and look, and play with the prototypes to understand the history of the design.

You’ll get a lot of information about the product and a feel for the design process and the company’s product design culture.

To summary

This article aimed to demonstrate to any product designer how to study a complex product in an unfamiliar domain to create an excellent UX design.

We discussed what a complex product is, why controlling the domain and the product is essential, and why it’s your responsibility to control it.

We looked at the two topics (Domain and product) and found out how you can get the information you need.

The domain:

Getting to know a domain is easy with these techniques:

• Talk with the product manager and product expert
• Watch Youtube videos
• Google it
• Join communities that discuss the domain
• Talk with users

The product

Here are some techniques for getting to know the product:

• Play with the product
• Look at the design materials
• Read usability tests documentation
• Talk to the sales department
• Contact the customer success team
• Take a look at the competitors’ YouTube videos
• Analyze your competitors’ products
• Discover the product’s history

Thank you for reading the article. I hope the article helped you understand how to study a complex product. Please feel free to share it with your friends or team members, and if you have any questions, please let me know.

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