Photo:^M
OBX^
2017
K
ino^ Inter
national^ (
Bj
oern- A
rne^ Eis
er
mann)VOICES
Interview
“When we go into a digital
environment, the laws of physics are
completely blown out of the water,” says
Sophia V Prater, UX coach, consultant and
founder of Rewired, a studio in Atlanta,
Georgia. “We do crazy things. It’s often
confusing and not rooted into how we
perceive reality.”
By way of an example, Prater tells the
story of how a hosting company recently
emailed her to let her know that two of
the URLs she owns were about to renew.
She decided to turn off auto-renew for
one of them and clicked ‘Manage
Renewals’ to do so.
“So I see a list of all my domains and,
if auto-renew is off, there’s a nice little
toggle to turn it back on,” says Prater.
“But if auto-renew is already on, there’s
no way to turn it off! I have to go to a
completely different part of the site to
‘My Domains’ and over there you don’t
use a toggle. So you have to carry out one
side of the action in one place and the
other action in another place. In the real
world, it would be like turning the light
on with a switch but to turn if off, I’d have
to go into the attic and pull a bunch of
levers. It just doesn’t make sense. That’s
what I call a broken object – we’re moving
metadata or content and scattering the
object throughout the experience as
opposed to encapsulating it. Everythingabout the object is usually contained
within the object.”
According to Prater, broken objects are
one of the biggest user experience fails.
To avoid them, she’s come up with a
process and methodology that she’s
named ‘object-oriented UX’ (OOUX),
which is focused on figuring out and
modelling the user’s world.
“The idea is that before I design any
screens, before I even wireframe or work
on the UI, I’m going to answer thefollowing questions: what are the objects
in the user’s world, what are they made
of, how do they connect and how do they
relate to the user?” says Prater. “If I get
those questions answered and make sure
that they’re clearly reflected in the user
interface, I have a much better chance of
this user interface being intuitive.”
Object-oriented UX has its basis in the
real world and how we navigate through
it. “So if I go into the bathroom and thenleave through the same door, I’m going
to expect to be where I was before,” Prater
argues. “But this often doesn’t hold true
in the digital world. While breaking the
laws of physics can be great – just look at
spellcheck and undo – you still need to
lean back on the principles of what users
will expect from any environment. Google
Photos is a good example of this: I’m in
my photo stream, I select some photos,
add them to an album and then go into
my album, rearrange photos and save it.
Then I click the Back button but it doesn’t
take me back to All Photos, where I just
was. It takes me to All Albums, which is
a page within this user session I haven’t
even been before. And this happens all
the time.”
Prater teaches OOUX within companies
(such as Macys.com, Mastercard, Delta
Airlines, and Intercom) and at conferences
all over the world, including generate New
York on 24 and 25 April. She developed
the process when she was a UX designer
at CNN.com and worked on the responsive
election night experience in 2012, viewed
by over 200 million people. It was an
incredibly high-profile and cutting-edge
project. Hardly any other news outlet at
the time had a responsive design and it
wasn’t until 2015 that CNN.com launched
a fully responsive site.
“This is where it all started,” Prater
remembers. “Responsive design was the
catalyst. We were way ahead of the time.
It was a big scramble and we did a lot of
things wrong but we did launch a
successful experience that didn’t break.
The page views were great and CNN made
all the money they wanted to make on
that night.”
Prater realised that the more moving
parts there were, the more likely a site
was going to break. Extraneous design
elements can easily creep into a product,
which not only increases development
costs but also makes life harder for users.
So Prater thought about how she could
simplify the 2012 experience without
dumbing it down. She didn’t want to show
less data but make it easier to build and
to do so responsibly.
“We reduced the number of modules
and templates. We made every module do
more work and we were reusing modules“Reducing the number
of moving parts and
prioritising elements
was what I should have
been doing all along”