Object-oriented approaches in action
Benefits of object-oriented user experience
In previous posts I have explained what an object-oriented approach to structuring information is, and how we are doing it at the Scottish Government. Now it’s time to explain why we are following this approach.
There are several benefits of building out a content model in this object-oriented way.
One is that it makes our content more connected. By identifying the most important relationships between different types of content, we can build those connections in our system. This in turn makes it easier to share information between systems, and improve navigation for users.
How object-oriented user experience transforms content for the better
In her Object-Oriented User Experience (OOUX) course, Sophia Prater gives an example of a research institute website she consulted on. This example spoke to me, having worked for 12 years for three different higher education institutions, each of which had sprawling web estates that suffered from an array of content management challenges.
Sophia Prater’s client used to have a typically chaotic web estate, with massive volumes of unstructured content going many levels deep in a one-dimensional hierarchical structure. The content lacked consistency, was a nightmare for users to navigate, and impossible to manage properly.
By adopting the object-oriented approach, they were able to boil their content down to a handful of key objects and their relationships. Things like the institute’s labs, locations and people — the real-world objects that make the organisation what it is.
The result was a heavily streamlined website, which was easier for users to navigate, and easier for the organisation to manage.
Because the new navigation was based on the real-world concepts that users knew the organisation had, it was more intuitive for users to navigate. Because each object in the content model had a defined purpose, it helped minimise the amount of redundant or unnecessary content. In turn, this made it easier for the organisation to manage, and reduced risk.
Precedents in the public sector
The Scottish Government is not the only organisation exploring object-oriented user experience in the public sector.
Renfrewshire Council has demonstrated great success by following object-oriented user experience and the orca method to develop their new content model.
In an alpha phase, they have carried out usability tests on object-oriented content about waste. These usability tests showed that the System Usability Scale increased from 50 on their existing live content, to 93 on the new object-oriented prototypes — an astonishing increase.
Blog post from Renfrewshire Council: Completion of the Alpha phase and next steps
Due to the success of their testing and prototyping, they are now using object-oriented principles to develop their new website.
In discussing structured information with colleagues in other government departments across the UK, we have found that many others across government, including the Government Digital Service, are actively exploring object-oriented user experience, understanding how it can be applied to government content, and in some cases running large-scale experiments to evaluate its success.
Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Trust have also used object-oriented user experience as the foundation of their digital transformation.
A journey to OOUX: Transforming digital at Moorfields Eye Hospital
Object-oriented user experience in action
The BBC has benefited from following these sorts of approaches to structured content for decades. The book Designing Connected Content by Mike Atherton and Carrie Hane draws on many examples from the BBC.
An exploration of the BBC Food website demonstrates what we can gain from thinking about our content in terms of objects.
The main navigation is mostly made up of objects the BBC have identified in their subject domain model:
This gives users a variety of ways to navigate to food-related content, depending on their needs.
Imagine you’re hosting a vegetarian friend for dinner, and you want to make a vegetarian lasagne. You can navigate through dishes to lasagne to find a list of recipes.
Because the recipes are also organised by diet, you could navigate via the diets section to find a list of vegetarian dishes.
Vegetarian recipes and diet information
And because the relationships between dishes, recipes and diets has been established, it is possible to use the search function to filter for all lasagne dishes that are vegetarian.
You might be drawn towards this lasagne aubergine melanzane recipe from Mary Berry.
Lasagne aubergine melanzane recipe
This is an instance of the recipe object. Parts of the structure of a recipe are visible here. It has a title, an image and a description. There are also attributes such as preparation time, cooking time, and how many people the recipe serves.
There is a list of ingredients. These have also been connected in the content model. So if you had spare aubergines that you needed to use up, you could have navigated to this recipe via the aubergine ingredient.
It is also possible to see the same list of ingredients in a “shopping list” view, which arranges the ingredients in an order that would be useful if you were in a supermarket. This even provides checkboxes next to each ingredient so that you can tick them off as you are shopping.
Lasagne aubergine melanzane shopping list
On the main recipe, it is also possible for users to add it to their favourites and rate the recipe. These are examples of calls to action in the orca method — the things users can actively do to the recipe object.
You can also see here that it’s by the chef Mary Berry, and it’s from the TV programme Mary’s Foolproof Dinners. These are also objects that have been connected to the recipe. So from here it is possible to select the programme and watch Mary Berry making this recipe on her TV programme.
On this programme page, you get a further set of details. You can see its series number, episode number and broadcast date. There is also the video itself, and the programme description.
This content is actually being pulled in from the BBC’s programmes database and BBC iPlayer. The iPlayer version of this content has a different view of the same content, which makes more sense in the context of using BBC iPlayer.
Mary’s Foolproof Dinners — Series 1: 1. Alan Carr
Here you can add it to your watchlist, and watch audio described or sign language versions of the programme.
There is another separate page for this programme structured for the context of BBC Two the TV channel.
BBC Two — Mary’s Foolproof Dinners
So if all you knew was that you saw a lasagne being made on BBC Two last week, you can go to the BBC Two website, find the programme in the TV guide, and navigate your way to the recipe from there. The BBC Two page pulls in the related recipes from the BBC Food website.
By this stage, it will come as no surprise that it is possible to get to this lasagne recipe via the Mary Berry chef page, if all you knew is that you saw Mary Berry making a lasagne.
If you’re interested, you can see the detailed structures that make all of this work seamlessly for users — the BBC’s food ontology:
In a parallel universe, where the BBC hadn’t defined these structures, each TV programme might have had its own website, publishing its own recipes in its own ways. Not only would this have been wasteful for the organisation by repeatedly solving the same problem in different ways, it would have made it much harder for the BBC’s users to navigate through this network of food content.
But by connecting this content and rooting those structures in real-world relationships, the BBC have instead created an incredible treasure trove of findable content. This database ties all of that content together in ways that makes it easier for the BBC to manage, and more intuitive for users to navigate.
This walkthrough of the BBC Food website has been heavily inspired by Sophia Prater’s. She also provides a YouTube video demonstrating how this approach works for users navigating the content.
The opportunity of connected content
When building websites, it can be tempting to plan it out as one big hierarchical sitemap. While this is relatively easy to conceptualise, it assumes one “happy path” for users to reach the content they need.
But if content only lives in one place in a sitemap, you need to be certain that your categorisation scheme is understandable and makes sense for every user’s context. They need to know exactly where you have put it, and exactly what you have called it. This is rarely the case.
The BBC shows there is another way. The structure of the BBC Food website facilitates multiple routes to the content users need. You can go in via a TV programme, a chef, an ingredient, a dish, a diet, or even a TV channel. No matter which of these ways their users are thinking of that recipe, BBC Food helps them find it.
Modelling content at the Scottish Government
Our aim with content modelling is to enable this sort of navigational approach, as well as to tap into the potential of creating or updating content once and having it publish everywhere it needs to be.
On our current web estate, it is hard to navigate between (for example) a service, the organisation that delivers it, the Directorates they run, and the things (objects) that are important to the people using our services. This is because we have not yet established these connections in our content model.
Imagine if our users could more easily find and filter what they want based on how they understand government, living and working in Scotland, and what they want from us.
There is a lot of work ahead to achieve this. But the examples of where this has worked for other organisations show us what we will be able to gain by succeeding in our approach.
