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Designing For Complex UIs, 2024 Edition

Vitaly Friedman
Your instructor
Vitaly Friedman

Workshop includes:

  • 🍵 Tea, coffee, snacks and drinks during the whole day
  • 🥪 Lunch
  • 📒 Paper and pen/pencil

Full-day workshop • Monday, October 28, 2024.
Roll up your sleeves — it’s time to brush up your UX skills! How would you architect an effective enterprise-grade table? How would you deal with intricate forms, filters and search UX? How do we design effective, accessible data visualizations? And how do we design better AI experiences for our customers, while respecting digital sustainability and inclusive design?

In this brand new workshop with Vitaly Friedman, a UX designer with the European Parliament and SmashingMag, we’ll cover all of it — with real-life UX challenges and 100s of practical examples and patterns that you can apply to your work right away.

Get ready: you’ll sail uncharted waters, design truly complex interfaces and receive feedback from people around the world. Plus: you’ll get a UX certificate for all your hard work as well.


Here’s What You Should Be Expecting:

  • Inspiring & Inclusive

    A full day of teaching in a friendly, inclusive group

  • Interactive & Practical

    Plenty of time for practice & feedback

  • Hands-on exercises

    With 1:1 reviews by Vitaly

  • Collaborative

    You’ll be working in groups with your colleagues all around the world

  • Dedicated Q&A time

    To ask all your questions

  • Digital Smashing Certificate

    A well-deserved reward for your work


549 .00 Register for this workshop → Get a single workshop, or bundle with a conference.

🎪  Save up to 25% on this workshop with a Smashing Membership.

Whether you’re working on enterprise-grade tables or complex multi-page forms, this workshop will give you the techniques and tools you need to excel at your work.

If you’ve attended a workshop on Complex Design Patterns in previous years, that’s a fully revamped and updated workshop tailored for more complex UX challenges.

The workshop includes:

  • 1500+ workshop slides with practical examples and action points
  • 100 checklist cards on everything from carousels to web forms
  • Editable checklists as text files to adjust for your needs
  • Access to the evergreen deck, updated regularly
  • Hands-on exercises and reviews
  • All workshop recordings
  • Dedicated Q&A time for all your questions
  • A Smashing Certificate

Who Is This Workshop For?

This workshop is for UX designers, interface designers, front-end designers and developers who’d love to be prepared for complex and time-consuming design challenges. You’ll walk away with a toolbox of techniques and examples of doing things well — in your product, website, desktop app or mobile app, be it a small mobile app or a large enterprise application.

In this workshop, you’ll learn:

  • Complex mega-menus with 4+ levels of navigation, layout, interaction design, sideways navigation, breadcrumbs, top task analysis, mobile/desktop (e.g. large university websites),
  • Advanced search and autocomplete UX, with layout and interaction design, when to show/hide suggestions, search query iteration, autocomplete blindness, faceted search, smart suggestions, type-ahead pattern, keyboard navigation, on mobile and on desktop (e.g. in enterprise software),
  • Sorting UX and Pagination UX, with sorting types, sorting behavior, default and customized sorting, multi-sorting, pagination types and pagination design,
  • Complex filtering, layout, auto-apply vs. manual apply, filtering overlays, filtering and sorting intervals, best practices and guidelines, on mobile and on desktop, sorting and paginatio UX (public archives, media library, large catalogs of products),
  • Enterprise-grade tables, complex use-cases with inline editing, filtering, tagging, sorting and search — on mobile and on desktop (insurance, loss prevention),
  • Designing For AI, with AI presets, contextual suggestions, temperature knobs, invisible clustering, scoping and how to design better AI UIs,
  • Design patterns for expert interfaces and B2B, with advanced features, visual indicators, customizable widgets, complex business logic, enterprise products, legacy systems, keyboard shortcuts, query constructors and 3rd-party integrations,
  • Data visualization, how to choose charts, how to design honest and effective charts, incl. formatting, color palettes, legends, formatting, tables and interactive filters,
  • Dashboards and spreadsheets, with complex layouts, data editing, inline filtering, infinite scroll UX, “load more” vs. pagination, access to footer and access to the current state, mobile optimizations,
  • Context menus UX for complex applications, nested menus, keyboard navigation, keyboard shortcuts,
  • Authentication and Privacy UX, and how to design authentication and gather accurate data while avoiding legal battles and respecting user’s data,
  • Sustainable UX, incl. presets, defaults, data collection, archiving, deletion, exporting and how to measure digital sustainability,
  • Accessibility of complex interfaces, with UX considerations, colorblindness, designing for older adults, children, people with autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, WCAG 2.2 compliance and EU Accessibility Act,
  • 100s of real-life examples, government and university websites, trip planners, financial services, eCommerce, online banking, configurators, insurance and mortgage calculators, data grids and enterprise products.
  • Designer’s toolkit, with useful Notion templates, Miro boards, Figma plugins and UX workshop kits for design and UX research,
  • Checklist for complex UIs with guidelines and decisions to consider when designing any component in a complex setting.

What Hardware/software Do I Need To Bring?

You’ll need to bring along good sleep your preferred coffee mug. We’ll be spending a lot of time thinking, designing, sketching. Be ready to challenge your design process and familiar design patterns. You’ll need a lot of sleep reserves since it’s going to be a packed day. Also, bring a lot of attention to detail and non-standard thinking to this one! ;-)

About Vitaly Friedman

Vitaly loves beautiful content and does not give up easily. Born in Minsk, Belarus, he moved to Germany in 1999 where he studied computer science and mathematics. While writing algebra proofs and preparing for software engineering at nights in the kitchen, at the same time he discovered passion for typography, UX and writing.

His curiosity drove him from interface design to front-end to performance optimization to accessibility and back to user experience over all the years.

Time & Location

This full-day workshop will take place the day before SmashingConf. The workshop will be running from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM on Monday, October 28.

The workshop is happening at Vestar, Lamorinierestraat 53, 2018 Antwerpen. Google Maps

Schedule for Monday, October 28

9:00 AM – Doors open, Registration
9:30 AM – Introduction & Kick-off
11:00 AM – Coffee Break
1:00 PM – Lunch
2:00 PM – Afternoon Session
3:30 PM – Coffee Break
5:30 PM – The End

Save EUR 100 when signing up for the conference and a workshop!

549 .00 Register for this workshop → Get a single workshop, or bundle with a conference.

🎪  Save up to 25% on this workshop with a Smashing Membership.