Sophia V Prater

Ahead of her workshop and talk at generate New York, Sophia Voychehovski Prater explains how you can use her object-oriented UX methodology to create intuitive digital products devoid of clutter

- Oliver Lindberg

“When we go into a digital environment, the laws of physics are completely blown out of the water,” says Sophia V Prater, UX coach, consultant and founder of Rewired, a studio in Atlanta, Georgia. “We do crazy things. It’s often confusing and not rooted into how we perceive reality.”

By way of an example, Prater tells the story of how a hosting company recently emailed her to let her know that two of the URLs she owns were about to renew. She decided to turn off auto-renew for one of them and clicked ‘Manage Renewals’ to do so.

“So I see a list of all my domains and, if auto-renew is off, there’s a nice little toggle to turn it back on,” says Prater. “But if auto-renew is already on, there’s no way to turn it off! I have to go to a completely different part of the site to ‘My Domains’ and over there you don’t use a toggle. So you have to carry out one side of the action in one place and the other action in another place. In the real world, it would be like turning the light on with a switch but to turn if off, I’d have to go into the attic and pull a bunch of levers. It just doesn’t make sense. That’s what I call a broken object – we’re moving metadata or content and scattering the object throughout the experience as opposed to encapsulating it. Everything about the object is usually contained within the object.”

According to Prater, broken objects are one of the biggest user experience fails. To avoid them, she’s come up with a process and methodology that she’s named ‘object-oriented UX’ (OOUX), which is focused on figuring out and modelling the user’s world.