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Discovery doesn’t have to be torture: enter OOUX
In UX Design, one of the most misunderstood things has to be discovery. The word “discovery” alone means different things to different people. For a designer, it may mean competitive analysis and contextual interviews. For a product owner, that could mean requirements gathering. For a manager, it often means something that has already been done, and we’ve spent enough time on research, and let’s get to screens already.
The discovery process often determines the success or failure of any project. Despite this, discovery often gets cut out of budgets because it’s not considered “real work.” I don’t understand how taking some time to look at things like what competitors do or what is frustrating current users is not considered valuable so often. It’s not like the world is clamoring for whatever it is you’re making that it needs to be done two weeks sooner (unless you work at Apple).
This makes discovery more awkward than it needs to be. Designers often get pressured to start creating screens as soon as possible. Those screens are made so early that not all requirements are known. Later on, when the requirements are finalized or changed (or both), designers and sometimes developers need to do much rework to accommodate that new information. If you want to de-motivate a team, tell them they need to redo something already ready for launch.
It doesn’t have to be this way. What if requirements and other vital information were uncovered early in the process? That extra time spent uncovering and understanding saves time later in the process because designers and developers understand what they are trying to make.
This is where Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) can come in to save a lot of people’s sanity. OOUX gives designers a framework they can adapt to empower themselves while they seek understanding. It also gives designers, developers, and stakeholders space to create a common language, saving time in useless meetings centered around misunderstanding terms. For example, I remember spending several weeks in meetings with people arguing back and forth about how an “alert” was different from a “notification.” The reality was that alerts and notifications were the same things. If you want to de-motivate a team some more, put them in a bunch of extra meetings.
