Practising designers & engineers In-house or online

UX for specialised domains

Consumer UX advice breaks down on expert tools. This course covers what replaces it: designing for density, respecting muscle memory, researching with users who are busier and more expert than you, and accessibility where the standard playbook runs out.

Audience
Designers, PMs & engineers
Length
7 modules · half-day each
Delivery
In-house or online
Domains
Engineering · health · gov · fintech

Why it exists

Most UX education is built on consumer apps: shallow flows, casual users, forgiving stakes. Expert software inverts every one of those assumptions.

I spent nineteen years designing tools for engineers who knew their domain far better than any designer would. This course is what I wish someone had taught me at the start of it.

What they will be able to do

Design for density

When whitespace is a cost, not a virtue — and how to structure dense information legibly.

Respect muscle memory

Change what needs changing without breaking reflexes experts built over years.

Research busy experts

Get 30 useful minutes from someone who resents giving you 10.

Handle data visualisation

Choose representations that answer the question — and know when a table wins.

Make expert tools accessible

Focus order, keyboard paths and screen-reader semantics for custom visualisations.

Run a teardown

Pull an interface apart methodically, rate severity, and write findings a team will act on.

Syllabus

Every module ends with work applied to the team's own product, not a case study from someone else's company.

01
The expert user
Why the standard persona model fails, and what to build instead when your user has a decade of domain training.
02
Research in expert domains
Access, recruiting, contextual enquiry on the job, and interviewing people who correct you mid-sentence.
03
Designing for density
Information hierarchy at scale, progressive disclosure experts do not resent, and the cost of whitespace.
04
Data visualisation & complex state
Choosing representations, handling scale, and designing for the moment the data is ambiguous.
05
Accessibility beyond the playbook
WCAG applied to waveforms, coverage maps, hierarchy trees and keyboard-first workflows.
06
Design critique & teardown analysis
A repeatable method for pulling an interface apart and finding what will actually cost users: severity rating, evidence, and writing the finding so a team acts on it instead of defending. Practised live on your own product and a competitor's.
07
Change management
Rolling out a redesign to users whose speed depends on the old one — phasing, opt-in, and measuring the transition.

Tailoring

Every run is adapted to the host organisation's domain — exercises use your product and your users, and the accessibility module targets the interface patterns your team actually ships.

Engineering & EDA

Simulation, verification, debug and analysis tooling.

Healthcare

Clinical systems, safety-critical workflows, records.

Government

Service design, accessibility duty, multilingual delivery.

Fintech

Dense dashboards, risk, regulated flows and audit trails.