In this two-part workshop, Sophia V Prater joins forces with Bram Wessel and his team at Factor.

First, we'll learn the ropes of Object-Oriented UX from Sophia, who's brought her methodology to Mastercard, Delta Airlines, Macy's, Intercom, CNN Digital, and more. After lunch, Factor will take over to show us how we make ambitious IA and OOUX project successful, even within the large, complex, and resistant-to-change industries.

9am-12pm

FOUNDATIONS OF OBJECT-ORIENTED UX

OOUX is a design philosophy that helps designers create experiences that are aligned to the business model, the user’s mental model, and the back-end database model. Misalignments among these worlds are often the cause of many communication headaches for the product team—and usability headaches for the end users.

But these misalignments can be avoided by answering these four fundamental questions:

• What are the OBJECTS?
• What are their RELATIONSHIPS?
• What CAPABILITIES do they afford?
• What are their ATTRIBUTES?

Objects, Relationships, Capabilities, Attributes—meet the ORCA process. When your team gets crystal clear on the answers to these questions before designing a single wireframe, you’ll reduce painful rework and extraneous design complexity. But most importantly, you’ll release useful, usable and future-proof products.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn the psychology of object-oriented UX and why it speaks to our lizard brains.
• Understand four biggest user experience fails—and how you can avoid them.
• Practice the first ORCA sprint: the Complexity Sprint. With a rainbow of sticky-notes and sample design challenge, you’ll identify objects, build a relationship model, brainstorm capabilities, and build an object map to structure your objects’ attributes.
• Get an overview of ORCA sprints 2, 3, and 4: the Requirements Sprint, The Prioritization Sprint, and the Prototyping Sprint.

12pm - 1pm

HEALTHY BOX LUNCH & NETWORKING

OK, taxonomy nerds, let's get to know each other, take a break, and perhaps get some fresh air if the weather is nice!

1pm - 4pm

ENTERPRISE IA & TAXONOMY

During the second half of the day, Bram Wessel and Erica Chao of Factor will show you how to take what you created in the morning session and implement it in your enterprise. One reason we like OOUX is that it focuses organizations on aligning business goals, user information needs, and back-end systems. We’ll show you how to socialize your model with stakeholders, be they sympathetic or skeptical, aligning your organization around a core set of information assets. We’ll also show you how to navigate scale and complexity challenges that organizations of every size face.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how to tell a molehill from a mountain, and how to adjust with scale.
• Understand your organization’s information topology so you can design a model that allows people and platforms to effectively share information.
• Map your Objects, Relationships, and Attributes across systems and processes, giving your organization new information management Capabilities.
• Determine whether centralized or distributed management is best for your Objects.
• Learn how measurement and governance can make your information ecosystem improve over time, keeping it durable and sustainable.