What is Object Oriented UX (OOUX)
Your audience wants your experience to do the heavy lifting for them and anticipate their desires and needs. They also don't want to have to figure out how you want them to behave with your brand. OOUX is a methodology with the power to make an experience that matches your audience's expectations. It mirrors the mental models they use in the real world and reflects that familiarity in the product. This makes them feel like they already know what to do.
The underpinning concept in OOUX is that you orient the experience around objects the user interacts with in the real world. You do this by looking at data which unveils the ‘nouns’ your audience uses in browser searches, interview transcripts and surveys and other sources.
These ‘nouns’ represent the object that the user wants to interact with. For example, Spotify orients its experience around ‘Songs’. The ‘Song’ as an object has many cues that mirror how a user identifies a ‘Song’ in the real world. These cues have been collectively inherited by the public over time and are in everyone's mental model. We see a square crop image, much like old vinyl singles or albums, a title and artist, a big old triangular play button from an old tape recorder and we just know we can play a song - we don't even have to think about it.
Setting the foundation for personalisation
The beauty of OOUX is once you have the foundation set and your audience can recognise the ‘objects’ they can get to in your experience or product, you can then layer on really effective personalisation and complexity within experience, and the user will still feel connected to the object and know what to do.
For example, a membership organisation might have places and events at places that are core to its offering. By defining these as objects and separating the attributes and metadata data of these objects in our back end systems and differentiating them visually in our front end systems the user can quickly identify these objects and search, sort and filter objects of interest to them.
But the real wonder is we can now easily add parameters that allow us to only show certain objects to certain people. If there’s a park or building that’s in a particular location that welcomes dogs and we know the user has searched for places to walk their dog, we can show them places nearby and related events where they can take the family pet.
Or if we have a member login, it's easy for us to show them places they haven't been near them and ticket prices for places on a card earlier in their journey that relates to their membership tier. Compartmentalising and defining objects and their specific attributes just makes personalisation much easier.
This is the first in a series of blogs about Object Oriented UX. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to hear more about in the field of OOUX please drop Kate a line here: kate.redfern@manifesto.co.uk