Designing software for unfamiliar domains

In recent years, software has become indispensable in complex domains such as science, engineering, biomedicine, and finance. Unfortunately, software developers and user researchers, who are usually experts in programming and human-computer interaction (HCI) methods, respectively, often find that the insight needed to design for complex domains only comes with years of domain experience. How can everyone on a software design team acquire just enough knowledge to design effective software, especially user interfaces, without having to become domain experts? We are performing a series of studies to investigate this question, with the ultimate goal of designing tools to help software teams better capture, manage and explore domain knowledge.