When you think of a kitchen, what words come to mind? What about when you think of a classroom? Or a game of football?
Chances are, the words you think of are nouns. Objects – like sink, food, freezer. Whiteboard, desks. Ball, goalposts, pitch.
As humans, we naturally turn to objects to help orient ourselves in the world. When we look through a shop window, it’s the objects we see inside which tell us whether that shop sells pet food or DIY supplies.
That’s the philosophy behind object-oriented user experience, or OOUX. Humans think in objects. And we need tangible, recognisable objects to help make sense of the physical spaces we’re in.
That’s true for digital spaces, too.
Citizens struggle to find what they need
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs’ policy design lab works on the farming programme, trialling innovative, experimental methods to tackle complex policy and delivery challenges. A few months ago, we turned our attention to the digital services and information we’re offering to farmers.
We deal with a lot of objects. We support farmers to carry out sustainable initiatives on their farms, offering funding and grants to help them buy equipment, build stores, repair buildings, care for livestock, and carry out environmentally friendly agricultural practices.
When it comes to representing all these things in a digital space, it can get busy.
Farmers have told us our content can be hard to find and understand. They’ve said that sometimes, it’s hard to know if they’ve found everything they need. They’re not always sure how farming rules, or funding schemes, apply to their personal situations. As a result, interacting with digital services from government can get frustrating, and take up precious time.
An object-oriented approach to services
Designers in government have lived by the mantra that good services are verbs, bad services are nouns. This is a design principle that’s enshrined in the government’s Service Manual.
The reality is that citizens are still confused by the name of some public services – including some which are verb-led.
For a citizen searching the internet, the significant hook in Apply for a provisional driving licence is not ‘apply’. And nor is it ‘driving licence’. It’s both.
I might need to ‘do’ lots of things when it comes to my driving licence – renew it, apply for it, return it.
But I’ll probably also need to use those verbs to ‘do’ other things too. I might renew my passport. Apply for a visa. Return a tax form.
In this example, neither noun nor verb are doing the heavy lifting – they’re both important. But it’s easy to get caught up in the naming of things – and worry about which is ‘correct’. Ultimately, if we don’t know how the user perceives the world – or describes the actions they need to do on objects – then we won’t be able to design something that meets their needs.
So in this project, before we even began thinking about interactions with government, we started by mapping farmers’ physical world, from their perspective.
What matters to farmers
As a policy lab, we started exploring how we could make this complex digital landscape simpler, and more intuitive, for farmers. That’s where OOUX came in.
We imagined how our digital offer might look if we framed it through the lens of objects – through the core concepts which matter to our users. If a farmer comes to us looking for the rules on storing slurry, or the funding they could get for building a new slurry store, or guidance on using a slurry separator, then they’ll need to go to 3 separate places. But what would happen if all that information could be found in one, connected place? That’s what we set out to investigate.
More strategic, user-focused information
Through a series of 3 workshops, we stress-tested the OOUX method on colleagues in the farming programme, to understand how it might work for different policy teams, and whether colleagues saw value in the approach.
Together, we developed an object map – a diagram of some of the objects which hold real-life value to the farmers accessing our information. We mapped out how those objects relate to each other, and the actions users need to take on those objects in the digital space. We also considered what key pieces of information users need to know about these objects, in order to meet their goals.
We sketched-out what our content might look like if it were framed through the objects on the map. As we did this, we interrogated – what difference does that make? How could this framing reduce duplication? Does it make things more intuitive for users? And how feasible would it be to develop content this way, going forward?
We started to get a sense of some of the ways this object-oriented approach might make things more intuitive to farmers. Some workshop participants thought this was a more strategic, user-focused way of displaying our information. Some thought it could make our internal processes more efficient and joined-up.
Continuous iteration
We were still left with questions… How would we feasibly map out all the objects important to farmers? How could something so huge be usable? How do we make such a fundamental change to the way we conceive of our digital offering?
This project was a successful way of quickly interrogating a method, putting it into practice and seeing what came out. While we started to see the value of OOUX, we still need more evidence before we can quantify the value it will have for farmers accessing our digital information.
Those will be the next steps – testing further, quantifying the value, and understanding the real impact this method has on making our information easier to find and use.
Since this project, the farming programme’s content improvement team are further exploring the OOUX approach. Working with the behavioural insights team, they’ve produced new drafts of some of our regulatory farming information, using an object-oriented approach. They’re in the process of testing these drafts, to get an evidence-based understanding of what difference OOUX could make to our farming information.
Go to the OOUX website to learn more about the object-oriented approach.
What do you think? We’d love to hear from you.…leave your comments below!
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