The object of information architecture

In my job at the Scottish Government, we are understanding the opportunities that can be provided by better structuring our information. We are using a variety of robust information architecture techniques, including an increasingly popular method called object-oriented user experience (OOUX), as taught by the user experience consultant Sophia Prater.

What was your first word as a baby?

To understand why we are following an object-oriented approach, I would like you to think back to your first word as a baby. None of us remember taking this milestone for ourselves, but you might have been told by adults close to you — or you might have seen some other babies making their first words. What do you think are the most common first words?

My mother tells me my first word was “gas”. While I am not sure I believe this, it does fit with most of the common first words — by being a noun.

Most babies’ first words are nouns like mummy, daddy, ball, cat or dog. One of my younger daughter’s first utterances was her big sister’s name.

These first words are heavily influenced by the things babies encounter in their everyday lives: close family members, favourite toys or pets. These are the objects they regularly interact with.

When do babies say their first words? What are babies’ first words most likely to be? — BBC Tiny Happy People

We learn by understanding objects

After being born, one of the first things a baby has to get to grips with is the fact that the rest of the world is different to them. They slowly develop a sense of self, and how the rest of the world is separate to their self.

They begin to identify some highly important objects in their world. Mum can be an important one in the early stages. Soon enough, they start to identify other objects like bottle and crib.

Once they are a bit older, around 6 months old, it’s time to play peekaboo. I’ve had a lot of fun playing this with my younger daughter over the past several months.

Peekaboo is all about object permanence: understanding how objects work, and that if they disappear, they can come back again.

At around the same time, babies start categorising the objects in their world. A key category to form is food. Through interacting with objects, they develop an understanding of what is food and what is not food.

Increasingly sophisticated thinking builds on this understanding of objects and their relationships. As children get older, they begin to form categories within categories.

For instance, within the next year, my 12-month-old will start to recognise more animals and begin to form sub-categories of animals. She will develop a grasp of the similarities and differences between pets, farm animals and wild animals.

Later, children begin to see objects from others’ perspectives, enabling them to develop empathy.

From there, they undertake increasingly sophisticated operational activities — performing arithmetic, understanding complex plot lines, and playing strategy games.

Our mental models — our sense of how the world works — are built upon our understanding of the objects the world is made up of, and the relationships between those objects.

For more on the psychological principles behind object-oriented user experience, I highly recommend Sophia Prater’s article: The object-oriented user.

Object-oriented approaches

This object-oriented approach is not new. Object-oriented programming emerged in the 1950s and became dominant by the 1980s.

Meanwhile, object-oriented user interfaces underpin common interaction concepts that have persisted for decades.

Think back to the first graphical user interface you ever encountered on a desktop computer. The interface will have contained metaphorical objects that reflect real-world things. This starts with the desktop metaphor itself, but also includes:

• Files
• Folders
• Bin
• Network
• Menus

…and so on. Look at the desktop machine you’re using today, and you’ll find all the same objects still in use, decades on from their introduction.

To get stuff done, users do things to the objects. You open a file. You then edit it. If you want to delete the file, you can move the file to the bin.

Users verb a noun.

But because the noun is the thing they want to interact with, object-oriented user interface design adopts what are known as “noun–verb” rather than “verb–noun” interaction patterns. This is because people think about the things first, before thinking about the actions they want to take on them. This is why you open a file to edit it, rather than use a global edit option to work with a file.

The same principles apply to information architecture decisions. This is why we are exploring object-oriented user experience to develop new approaches to structuring our content.

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In other posts, I describe how we are doing it, and the benefits we expect to see.