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Redefining discovery: A multi-stepped journey for a newly minted OOUX-er
You can add OOUX to your toolset to strengthen your UX process and dramatically improve your discovery phases. I go through the full process here step by step.
I recently completed my certification as an Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) Strategist, and this was my project for the duration of the class. Here, I go through the process of OOUX, step by step, in context. While this methodology may seem complex at the outset, especially if you, like me, have done UX for any length of time, I was able to use this process to make a better prototype.
If you want to read about how to use OOUX techniques on an already existing site, you can do that too. I go through a modified version of this process here.
For my class project, I chose to do a project called GiftSync, which is an app that could interact with Amazon to track and recommend gifts for the important people in your life. The hypothesis is that the act of gift-giving, especially on a site as vast as Amazon, is a difficult process. On Amazon, you have to already know what you want to give and you have to time deliveries to dates on your own. An app that could combine potential recipient’s wishlists with Amazon’s vast data on products and reviews could be repurposed to help curate gifts. Although Amazon does have a gift finder, I found the current features lacking in personalized curation.
Discovery
To me, object oriented UX makes sense on two levels: first, it is a framework for organizing content that is based on how the human mind works, that is by objects (nouns). Second, it breaks down complexities by identifying the nouns (objects), verbs (actions), and adjectives (metadata) in a way that can be visualized and therefore quickly understood.
I did an exercise called noun foraging to start collecting possible objects (nouns) I would use to create an information architecture for this project. If I were doing this for a client, I would be noun foraging with user interview transcripts.
Since this is for a class and not a client, I did not have user interview transcripts that I would ordinarily use for a discovery process. Not having interviews is not an unusual thing for a UX designer to deal with, so I…
