Detangling Information Architecture with Object-Oriented UX

What you’ll learn

Many UX designers, product owners, and the people responsible for the digital world are facing incredible complexity. As they try to design simple front-end solutions for their users, the back-end reality of multiple databases, multi-level permissions, APIs, and content governance often seems impossible to tame. In this workshop, participants learn Object-Oriented UX, a methodology that helps wrangle that complexity into a tidy array of color-coded sticky notes. Participants will return to their organizations with a repeatable, scaleable, and collaborative tool for detangling—and visualizing—even the most convoluted IAs.

Benefits

• Understand why consistent, recognizable digital objects are important, from a psychological perspective.
• Extract the important business objects from stakeholder requirements and research, which will become the pillars of your strong information architecture.
• Create object-relationship models with crows-feet diagrams, which will inform intuitive and natural navigation.
• Get a handle on the full scope of your functionality requirements with a capabilities inventory.
• Build an object map, a magical artifact that gives a team X-ray vision into the system they are trying to design.
• 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.
• Understand your organization’s information topology so you can design a model that allows people and platforms to effectively share information.

At the end of the workshop, you will receive a certificate of completion.

Testimonials

About the instructors

Sophia Prater is the “chief evangelist” for object-oriented UX, a methodology she began popularizing back in 2013. She’s also the organizer of the Atlanta chapter of Ladies that UX, the creator of the UX Hustle Summit Conference, and the host the UX Hustle Podcast. Today, Sophia focuses on bringing the magic of OOUX to companies and teams around the world. She’s taught and implemented OOUX at Macys.com, CNN.com (elections 2012 and 2016), Facebook, Mastercard, Credit Karma, Athena Healthcare, Delta Airlines, Ultimate Software, Intercom, and dozens more.

Bram Wessel is co-founder of Factor, an enterprise IA consulting practice in Seattle. In over a quarter-century of experience as a user-centered design and research professional, Bram has arrived at the strong conviction that digital technology should be an enabler —not the object— of human experiences. Bram has provided information architecture, user research, and interaction design for a diverse array of organizations such as Adobe, Amazon, Backcountry, the City of Seattle, Common Spirit, Crate & Barrel, Disney, Expedia Group, Funko, GE, Genuine Parts Company, Group Health, Intel, Lionsgate, Microsoft, Nordstrom, Real Networks, Safeco/Liberty Mutual, Sony, Starbucks, Volvo, UW Medicine, and Warner Brothers, among many others. A tireless advocate for the IA/UX discipline, Bram is a frequent speaker at conferences such as the Information Architecture Conference, Interaction, World IA Day, UX Week, ConveyUX, Seattle Interactive Conference, Taxonomy Bootcamp, Enterprise Search & Discovery, and Seattle Design Festival. He also takes pride in Factor’s support of the regional UX and IA community’s meetups and workshops. Bram is committed to educating the next generation of practitioners through his co-development of the Information Architecture curriculum at the School of Visual Concepts, and as a guest lecturer at the University of Washington’s MCDM and MLIS programs. Bram was the co-executive producer of Interaction ‘19, the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) conference which was held in Seattle in February 2019. Bram is also a past board member of Info Camp Seattle, the Information Architecture Institute and IxDA Seattle. In his spare time, Bram enjoys fly-fishing, shellfish farming, and winemaking.