How to think about (and use) OOUX

Let me give you a hypothetical situation: imagine the National Park Service (NPS) has brought your team on board to design a new trail-finding experience for users. The current NPS app doesn’t give users the ability to find and see trails — and user research is telling you that finding and choosing trails is what people want most from the app!

You’d love a week or two to figure out what needs to change, what needs to be included, what features and functionality might deliver the value both users and the organization are looking for.

You’re only getting three days.

Fortunately for you, OOUX is really, really good in tough spots like this one.

Enterprise UXers and Designers often come to me completely overwhelmed as to where to start when redesigning a legacy system. Which is often tied to two or three other legacy systems. The problem is usually that they’re thinking in terms of redesigning entire sets of screens across multiple interaction sequences. All at once.

That’s a recipe for disaster, so what I always recommend instead is a lot like an old riddle you may have heard:

How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

In this case, that enterprise system is your elephant. So instead of trying to tackle it all at once, you pick one or two concepts, things that occur repeatedly throughout the system.

Let's say you work at a company that makes an investment app — the system will probably be made up of concepts like accounts, deposits, stocks, news articles. So you pick deposits and stocks to start with. The point is that you start with something that is (a) relatively simple to tackle and (b) widespread, occurring on the majority of screens your users see or tied to the majority of interaction that takes place.

Now, here’s the key to making this approach work: your focus cannot be on UI design, on how something looks or where it’s placed onscreen or even how it behaves; instead it’s on priority — what elements (objects) are mission-critical, of most usefulness and value to users?

Sophia V Prater and I have just launched a new course on Udemy called Object-Oriented UX Fundamentals. And Sophia's approach to OOUX in that course is the same as what I describe here: she describes her approach to objects as forced prioritization. What she’s preaching here — and what I routinely preach to product design teams — is the same thing: forget the layout. It’s not important yet.

The critical inch here is to prioritize content and functionality. That’s job one. Why? Because if you don’t get this right, any other decisions you make about interaction or visual design won’t help anyone do anything.

Now, as much as we’d love to have all that content in a known, finished state at the time we’re doing that work, you and I both know that rarely happens. OK, never happens. So what do we do?

We focus on what we know, on what’s tangible and available.

We focus on objects.

Of course, we have to consider the larger system — but we’re doing it through the lens of objects familiar to the user (products, tutorials, locations) instead of actions (search, filter, compare, check out).

Nouns instead of verbs.

So instead of doing what we’ve all been taught to do — diving headfirst into use scenarios, workflows + interactions — we define the objects first and allow the actions to be informed by those objects.

That’s OOUX: putting the design of objects before the design of procedural actions.

Another big benefit is that most developers and engineers already think and work this way. Which makes collaboration with designers and UXers a lot more frictionless; everyone’s essentially speaking the same basic language.

So — here’s how I want you to think about Object-Oriented UX as you watch and listen to Sophia in OOUX Fundamentals course. OOUX is a simple, practical approach to good UX and design that:

1. has the power to radically simplify how much we actually need to research and touch in some way,
2. keeps us focused on how users make sense of their world, along with what they care about most and expect, and
3. invites and improves collaboration with developers and engineers, while also eliminating the communication gap between the two disciplines.

Simple. Powerful. Practial.

That's OOUX.

(P.S. You can learn how to put that power and practicality to use in our new Object-Oriented UX Fundamentals course on Udemy. The response has been overwhelming and we could not possibly be more grateful.)