UX Design: Idiomatic, Object-Oriented Design

How to leverage idiomatic, and object-oriented UX to improve your products, and save your team a massive amount of headache down the road.

Define your MVP’s primary purpose

The very first step in this process is to clearly define your minimum viable product’s primary purpose.

This purpose is often a sentence, or list, that describes the primary purpose of your MVP in a straightforward, declarative fashion.

Primary purpose list example for our example application

For our purposes here, as an example, let’s say we’re designing a task-based productivity application we’ll call Solution X.

Primary Purpose

The primary purpose of Solution X is to allow users to:

• Record tasks that they need or want to do as a list.
• Execute on those tasks in a time-tracked, time-bound way.
• View statistics and reports on that execution over time.
• Get recommendations based on their execution, or lack thereof.

See what I mean? Simple, clear, very easy to understand what it is and what it does from a high level.

Moving on.

Create your object tree

Now that we know what the primary purpose of Solution X is, we can create an object tree based on those parameters.

Solution X object tree example.

As you can see, relatively straightforward.

• Our solution has users.
• Those users have lists, and settings & preferences.
• Those lists have a timer, tasks, and a report.
• That timer has a time readout, and settings.
• Those tasks have descriptions, recorded times, and sub-tasks.
• Etc.

You can see how this tree-based view of all the major objects in your solution makes it much…