All the things

Object oriented UX

Stumbling into objects

Forget pages

Think about objects instead

At this point, I stopped trying to manage these complex and confusing relationships between pages, navigation and content, and began to thing about objects instead... Things.

The impetus for this change was a couple of articles I read by Sophia Voychehovski Prater. In these articles, she descibes a fast moving, high profile project that needed to turn around quickly. So rather than beginning by designing pages, which she could pass off to developers one-by-one, she had the insight to beging by modeling all the pieces of the system that would be necessary, all the properties that compose those pieces, and all the interactions a user would need to make on those pieces.

So, inspired by this, I started to question all the "pages" people thought they needed. FAQs? About page? Maybe they would end up being useful, but lets not worry about that yet. Let's first just focus on the things. Lets model an interconnected system of objects

Objects are user oriented

People form mental models around things, not pages.

Properties

People describe objects according to their fundamental traits.

Taxonomies

People classify objects into related groups.

Actions

People connect with objects by taking action on them.

Metadata

Businesses succeed by growing intelligence.

Relationships

Objects reveal one another by their relationships.

A shared framework

Users

Mental model

Designers

UI model

Engineers

Implementation model

Stakeholders

Business model

So speaking of relationships, as a final point, I want to talk about how this object-oriented design approach can help be a benefit to all the parties who are touched in the software development process.

First and foremost we are designing a system of interrelated objects that will form our users mental models. For them, its a framework for understanding information and their interaction with it.

We designers now need to go design those pages and buttons that we initially avoided. But now we have a framework for all the parts of the system, all the building blocks from which we can construct an experience.

The software engineers, who need to actually and go build this thing, will love you for this. In a way you've done some of their work for them, designing what could easily be translated to a database schema. This is something they needed to do anyway, but might not have been able to get a complete picture of by looking at page mockups alone.

And finally our clients, the stakeholders of the project. Maybe it occurred to you that, in some cases, we might actually be helping to structure a business model that might extend well beyond a website.

So, perhaps the most valuable benefet of taking an object-oriented design approach is getting all these people on the same page. And I think you know how hard that can be.

This is nothing new

Object-Oriented UX (2015) and OOUX: A Foundation for Interaction Design (2016)
in A List Apart by Sophia Voychehovski Prater
Designing Object-Oriented User Interfaces (1995) by Dave Collins

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