NEW YORK 24-25 APRIL 2019
VOICES
Interview
making changes. In 2016 the modules on
CNN’s election night experience were
carbon copies of each other.
Prater starts her process by
collaboratively building an object map
with the help of sticky notes to figure out
the objects and their relationships. She
then tends to design a more sophisticated,
digital version of the sticky notes with
Sketch and prototypes a CMS with
Webflow – even before any wireframes
are created. “I can spin up a CMS in two
hours and have a beautiful experience for
someone to come in and start filling with
real content, which is just amazing,”
Prater enthuses. “Usually, the object-
mapping process will get it about 80 per
cent right and with the prototypes we can
get really close.”
Object-oriented UX is suited for all
kinds of organisations but the more
complex the system, the more it’s needed
to make sure objects are represented
consistently across different touch points.
A recent example is the site for Georgia
Tech Research Institute (www.gtri.gatech.
edu). “The site had a very heavy main
navigation,” Prater remembers. “There
was no way it could go into a mobile
scenario. It had four levels of navigation- a big top nav, lots of dropdowns and a
side nav with accordions inside of it. And
every little piece of content was basically
a dead end. When you got the content,
you had to go back to main navigation. So
we defined the objects, constructed
relationships between them and now you
can navigate from one object to another.
Unless you want to restart, you never have
to touch the main navigation. It’s just
there, as I like to call it, as the fire escape.”
Prater also loves mentoring people. She
leads the Atlanta chapter of Ladies that
UX and created a local conference called
UX Hustle Summit to help UX designers
on their career path. Recently, she
combined her two passions and ran a
workshop to jump-start designers’ UX
portfolios with OOUX. “It’s very meta,”
Prater laughs. “Everybody worked on
architecting their UX offering, case
studies, skills, clients, education – all the
things that showcase you as a UX designer
and then we analysed how those things
connect. So it’s really just using the UX
portfolio as a vehicle to teach object-
oriented UX but people who were stuck
with their portfolio now have an amazing
head start.”
Next on the schedule is a redesign of
Crosslinked, a card game that teaches the
principles of OOUX. “It’s a real labour oflove,” Prater explains. “I’ve been working
on it for two and a half years. If you’re
with somebody who’s already played it,
it takes about 10 minutes to learn but if
you’re trying to read the instructions, it
takes about an hour, which is just too
much. Especially as most people will want
to play it in their lunch break in a work
environment. So I’m working on
simplifying it. The entire process of the
game design has been an exercise in
elimination and reducing complexity,
which is what OOUX is all about.”
Prater’s ultimate goal is for the term
object-oriented UX to disappear, as it
becomes normal UX practice. Until that
happens, OOUX’s chief evangelist
continues to travel the world to tell people
they just need to add this one piece to
their existing process to make everything
else easier. It’s a repeatable, foolproof
process for creating elegant, naturally
intuitive digital environments.Prater will run a full-day OOUX workshop at
generate on April 24. To book a place visit http://www.
generateconf.com