I am bringing Object-Oriented UX to the world. People navigate the world through their mental map of the relationships between the OBJECTS they interact with. So why should that change when we transition to a digital world? Spoiler alert: it shouldn't. Object-Oriented UX helps digital designers create naturally-intuitive user experiences that give our users super powers.
Free 1 Hour OOUX Mini-Workshop inside, complements of WWF 🐼
What's up, Reader!✴️ Hi everyone, we had some copy/paste weirdness in our newsletter this morning! So we've re-sent it the way it was meant to go out. Thanks for being a part of OOUX! One of the most common questions that I get is how to get started with OOUX in order to start seeing results ASAP. Yes, I get it, implementing ORCA in all of its glory (all 4 rounds of analyzing your objects, relationships, calls-to-action, and attributes) — often takes leadership buy-in as well as changes in the rhythm of your day to day work. Definitely not impossible, but usually not the first step. Because, as previously mentioned: BUY IN. You have to take an inch before you can take a mile. There’s tons of ways to take that first inch (or 2.54 centimeters for our metric friends 😉), but one of the best get-started-now approaches is to do an OOUX Audit and find low-hanging fruit in the form of unintuitive objects. Here’s a simple exercise you can do alone or with your team, leveraging the latest episode of OOUX, We Did it Again, our YouTube channel dedicated to exposing unintuitives and showing our quick fixes. In the last episode, we went long as we picked apart the World Wildlife Fund’s website. (We are trying to make these videos more bite-sized, but we keep getting sucked down rabbit holes — working on it!) But this longer video really shows you how much you can uncover in less than an hour. So here’s what I propose to you. Let’s use WWF as an example of how squashing unintuitives can help an organization: ✅ Increase trust. ✅ Improve navigability, meaningful exploration, and clarity. ✅ Improve conversions. ✅ Reduce cognitive load — on end users, content creators, and even you, the designer. 🤓 1-hour OOUX Audit PracticeTake 20 minutes: Visit https://www.worldwildlife.org/ and try to answer these questions: 🟦 OBJECTS 🐼 Can you identify the objects that make up this non-profit’s domain? Which critical parts of their system are easy to identify and understand — and which objects are fuzzy and confusing? 🎭 Can you find any masking? Remember, Masked Objects are two different objects, two things with fundamentally different meaning and purpose, that look almost identical. Tip: compare some detail pages. ✅ Clear, consistent recognizable objects instill a strong feeling of trust and reliability in users. 🟦 🟦 RELATIONSHIPS 💀 Can you find any Isolated Objects? Aka, “dead ends”? Look for objects that have really obvious relationships in your mental model of this domain — but do not have navigation between them on the site. 🫥 Can you find any missing objects? Things that are in your mental model but are not objectified, instantiated, and structured on the site? Often, missing objects are like missing stepping stones — preventing users from hopping between concepts, thwarting their ability to explore. ✅ Navigation that reflects real-world mental models is naturally intuitive and encourages confident and meaningful exploration — instead of aimless “just clicking around”. 🟩 CALLS-TO-ACTION 👆What’s really great about the CTAs on this site? How does WWF beautifully “objectify” donations? 💔 Where could WWF improve? Can you find any Broken Objects — objects without clearly-connected CTAs? Where does WWF create barriers between the user and donations? ✅ Objects that are directly manipulable give users confidence in taking action on those objects. Digital direct manipulation reflects how human beings take action on things in the real world: by reaching out and grabbing things. 🟨 🟥 ATTRIBUTES 👻 And finally — look for Shapeshifters. Where do attributes shift arbitrarily on an object from one context to another? Where is WWF making everyone work a little harder than they need to? ✅ Keeping objects as consistent as possible gives end users less to learn, content creators less duplicative updates, and designers less wheels to reinvent. Oh, and gives developers less to build. Design efficiency! Imagine that. 30 minutes: Watch Allie and I (on 1.25 speed, haha) as we pick apart WWF. Compare our findings to yours.
Make sure to comment on the video as let us know what you found that we missed! We’d love to hear (and the YouTube algorithm loves to see comments and likes — so thank you for that in advance!) 💙💛❤️💚 Cheers and happy OOUX Auditing! OOUX Forum DigestUp-level your career with OOUX...
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I am bringing Object-Oriented UX to the world. People navigate the world through their mental map of the relationships between the OBJECTS they interact with. So why should that change when we transition to a digital world? Spoiler alert: it shouldn't. Object-Oriented UX helps digital designers create naturally-intuitive user experiences that give our users super powers.
Reader. Real talk. If you listen to one OOUX Podcast episode this year, listen to this one. As much as I love all my podcast guests and each conversation about the transformative magic of OOUX — this one just HITS.First, we talk numbers. Real numbers. How OOUX drastically improved several usability metrics. Many of you “want to believe” in OOUX but have been waiting to get cold hard stats — and I’ve been less-than-organized about capturing those (*self-flagellates*). But in the first 10...
Will Poole invented a new OOUX diagram, Reader, and it’s AWESOME. Part Nested-Object Matrix, part system model, part Nav Flow — I don’t know what to call this diagram but I freaking love it. Actually, can we call it a Nested-Object Flow? That feels right. In his case study presentation on the OOUXing of an app for Premier League coaches, Will made it clear that he still created a NOM to work through relationships — but when it came to presenting for his clients, he needed something a little...