Interview
on different pages. But when I analysed
the project, I realised that reducing the
number of moving parts and prioritising
all the elements was what I should have
been doing all along, regardless of
responsive design.”
Initially, Prater called her process
modular design but then she started
looking into object-oriented programming
and had, as she puts it, a smack-your-
forehead moment. “I realised this was
what developers were doing when they
build databases,” she explains. “They’re
determining the objects and figuring out
the substance and the relationships of
those objects but they’re not necessarily
doing the user research to make sure that
the objects in the database are in direct
correlation with how the users are
thinking. I realised that the user
experience designer can be the connection
point between how the user thinks about
the objects and how the developer needs
to build them. That’s why I called it object-
oriented UX: I was stealing from the
programming world and how we can take
all the benefits that programmers
experience when they go from procedural
to object-oriented code.”
In 2016 Prater returned to work on
CNN.com’s election night experience, this
time as a consultant. By then OOUX was
a well-oiled machine and, because the
information architecture was exactly the
same, it became more of an exercise in
refining and improving the process and
thus the experience.
“In 2012 I moved pieces of metadata
around slightly, which increased the
cognitive load on users,” Prater pointsout. “That’s the last thing you want to do,
especially on a website that’s being used
on one night only. There should be a zero
learning curve, so you don’t want to make
arbitrary changes, which I call ‘shape-
shifter modules.’”
Prater describes a shape-shifter as an
object that’s not consistently represented
or placed. Users learn where to look for a
piece of metadata, so if they expect the
price on a website to be in light grey text
in the bottom corner, they might still not
see it if it’s in red at the top. Sometimes
there’s a very good reason for an object
to be represented differently if the context
on the site changes, but often they’re not
intentional changes on the designer’s
part. Prater therefore recommends you
test designs repeatedly and be aware that
you may sacrifice consistency when