When OOUX meets API design: Love at first "site"
There’s a digital design methodology gaining steam that you've likely never heard of, but that could make a big difference in your API design being clean, intuitive, and effortlessly usable for devs who use it. It’s called object-oriented user experience (OOUX). OOUX is a design power tool that helps us define usable, consistent products that naturally align with end users’ mental models. Similar to its namesake, object-oriented programming, it asks us to define the objects in the real-world problem domain and design the information and relationships in each object before designing how the user might manipulate them. The highly structured nature of OOUX means it directly contributes to clean data modeling and highly portable systems that translate well to exposure via API. It's a powerful tool and it pays dividends fast. In this session, you’ll get a high-level overview of what OOUX is and why it’s a game-changer, a discussion of the parallels and complementary concerns between OOUX and API design, and an idea of how API design planning could be represented in an OOUX data model.
Prerequisites
Previous THAT attendees who joined my OOUX talk in 2019 will have a leg up on the OOUX content, but (hopefully) not necessary to benefit from the talk.