How to Build a Better Product Using Object-Oriented UX: Part One

What is this new process and does it work?

I know what you’re thinking: more abbreviations? How can I possibly need another abbreviation in my UX/UI/IA repertoire? Well, I’m here to tell you — you do. This new school of thought took my design process and flipped it on its head. Something I desperately needed while staring out the door of my closet office for an entire year during quarantine, feeling severely burnt out and bored.

Let’s try an experiment: Think about your kitchen. Ignore the coffee stains on the countertops and imagine your cupboards. How are they organized? Write down the first 3 words that come to mind.

Now, think about healthcare. Free rein to get creative. No specifics here. Write down the first 3 words that come to mind.

In your kitchen list, chances are you probably have words like “dishes,” “silverware,” and “cups.” For healthcare, maybe you’ve written words like “vaccines,” “doctors,” and “hospitals.” Maybe it’s “nurses,” ”pills,” and “x-rays.”

Okay, one more: What 3 words would you list for the last design project you worked on? For me, I’ve got “documentation,” “APIs,” and “developers.”

Do you notice something that all the words I listed have in common? I do: They’re all nouns.

Who am I?

Let it be known that I’m a real rhetoric nerd. At one point, I thought I wanted a career in technical writing. First of all, can you imagine? I am exactly zero parts detail oriented. Secondly, the mildly amusing blog posts I wrote along the way weren’t exactly screaming “Hire me to write this multi-million dollar grant.” Since senior year of college isn’t a great time to switch majors, I stuck out the Professional & Technical Writing degree but took every design course that overlapped. Shockingly, there were a decent amount of classes in the overlap category. Certainly not with Art 111: Intro to Drawing, but Writing for Electronic Spaces had me inspecting HTML and learning what translates well onto a screen.

My word nerddom follows me to this day but generally sits on the back burner (unless provoked by the suggestion to use “get” in a CTA). Since college, I’ve had an entirely design-focused career, mostly rooted in UI & UX. It’s been over a decade of designing forms, using blue in all UIs, and redesigning previously mentioned forms. I’ve dabbled with most facets of design across all different business sectors. Most recently, I’ve found myself as a Lead Designer at athenahealth, trying to make the developer onboarding experience easier and its documentation more useful. Of course, blue is involved.

Object-Oriented UX: What exactly is it?

Our community has been preaching user-centered design for a while now. We’ve made sure that product owners let us interview the actual humans who will use our software, rather than designing in a vacuum. Our Jira tickets are crafted as user stories — detailing what they need and why.

…but what about objects? I’m not talking about objects in the sense of your design system. Sadly, I don’t mean the superb date picker you spent the last 3 months documenting. What I’m talking about is the thinking that’s happening before that date picker is created. What does the date picker represent, and why do you need it? Users are not coming to your site to see this great date picker in action. They’re coming for the object, the noun, the thing that this date picker represents. They’re coming for the event — the concert, the art gallery opening, the basketball game.

What is the event, though? How many times have you dove straight into how a user will register for the event versus defining what the event is? If our natural thought process is centered around objects and how they related to one another, why are we still designing procedurally, focusing on drill-down hierarchy or linear task flows? *brain explodes*

So, what is object-oriented UX (OOUX), then, and how does it fit into all of this? Simply put, it’s the practice of defining a system of objects before jumping into task flows and interaction design. To better design a thoughtful experience for how a user would register for an event, OOUX first challenges you to think through the structure of the event and how it relates to other objects within the system. If we go back to using concert as our event, we know there will be a performer, a location, a venue. There will probably be supporting bands, as part of a cross-country tour, playing at different venues in various cities. And this is just the tip of the iceberg! OOUX is about figuring out the objects in your system before you design how users will interact with them. By moving interaction design to the end of the process, we as designers can be more intentional and focused on information architecture.

How do I use OOUX?

Stay tuned! Over the next few months, I want to share some of my learnings from my OOUX certification. Not only will I define what all this OOUX business is, but also, I’ll walk through how to implement it. Most importantly, I want to share how is it changing the way I work. No spoilers yet, though. You’ll have to tune in to find out more!

Would you like to know more about OOUX? Check out OOUX.com for more resources.

Have you worked with OOUX before this? Let me know in the comments!

If you have other questions or are interested in athenahealth, please reach out via LinkedIn. I’d love to have a conversation and share even more about the great work being done here in platform services.