Stop making user flows, do this instead

one of the best techniques that I think flies under the radar for a lot of ux designers is object-oriented ux design now object-oriented ux design is derived from something called object-oriented programming and this is a technique that's been used in software engineering and data modeling for years really what this focuses on is the objects and things user interacts with and the actions that they perform based on those things rather than the linear or steps or flow that a user is going to complete what I want to talk about today is how a programming technique can actually make you a better designer most ux designers spend their time thinking about flow user flows and journey Maps and these are really great tools to get a sense of the tasks and the requirements that a system needs to be able to perform it helps us understand the requirements on the user it helps us kind of get an understanding and Alignment around what the things that a user is going to need to do but the flows and Journeys can be actually quite misleading to the actual requirements of a product and and it could be limiting in how you explore what a product or feature should do the primary problem with flows and Journeys is that they are pretty linear but what happens when we get something more complex where the flow or the linear nature of a product is not quite as obvious in healthcare a lot of the products and kind of requirements that products fill for users is not linear at all in fact there is a lot of almost cyclical in nature work in fact when I have spent my time interviewing Physicians or clinicians in healthcare focusing on a flow is actually pretty limiting and assuming tasks that either are outdated irrelevant or unnecessary object-oriented ux provides an opportunity for us to understand the complete nature of the requirements of a feature and helps us and gives us a foundation to further build on in order to create something that is truly solving the problem at hand so let's take a look at a particular problem in object in healthcare that I think object-oriented ux can help us solve I want to talk a little bit about Charming in healthcare there is something called a chart and specifically in electronic health records charts are things that a physician needs to complete in order to essentially document their interaction with a patient now the documentation is a important part of a chart but there's another important part of that chart that is um quite often overlooked and that is the billing aspect for all intents and purposes today I'm not going to really touch on the billing aspect too much but that object oriented ux can help us solve that as well but what I want to talk about is the actual Act of creating a chart because if we were to create a linear flow that demonstrates how a physician charts we'd actually be looking at something that makes a lot of assumptions about how that action happens so if we were to do this and I'm going to so let's go ahead and create a estimate for what we might look at when we look at a linear charting flow so let's go ahead and make a linear user flow diagram for charting we might have a clinician kind of you know opens the charts they might say I'm going to you know read details about the patient they may interview the patient and perform an exam and then they might say I'm going to start right writing the chart now this is approved now we're making a pretty high level diagram this is really just very high level to kind of get an idea of the user Journey we're not really talking about user flow so much um but let's talk about the actual process of writing the chart so I'm going to make a new diagram down here and I'm going to say okay so we're going to write the chart now we know charts and specifically notes are made up of several different sections uh the subjective objective assessment and plan to create some efficiency we want to standardize around how a user creates section and edits that section add a section and then um you know they're going to edit the section and within that editing experience they can add things like Vera I'm going to say we can have things like variables um you know maybe we can add things like you know preset sentences um you know we can maybe even add things like um You Know Rich content or media so like we could say hey we're going to let you uh add like you know an Imaging scan or a chart that demonstrates you know the history of blood pressures now I'm going to I have all these things and then the next part of this is really um you know code code and or yeah so code the chart which is essentially how a physician will uh say I this is what I think we can be billed for and then suck now the cool thing about this is I get an idea of here's kind of the high level things that someone used to do I know that they need to edit suction that they're going to be um you know different types of sections potentially that they're going to be different types of variables there's going to be rich content um there's this task around coding um but I haven't really dived into the details here now we can actually create much more detailed flows in this as well but one of the things that might be challenging here is once we do we end up with potentially five or six different flows and really a quite a mess of different um you know potential Pathways that clinician may need to actually flow through in order to complete this step so where does object oriented ux come into play here so if we were going to take this and give it an object-oriented perspective on this flow I would actually start with this so I would start with the note section so I'm going to create a new heading here and I'm going to say just like note sections so I can look at this and immediately start saying okay what are the things inside of a note section well for one thing we're going to have a type of section so that's going to be uh you know essentially the subjective objective assessment or plan this can also be the physical exam the history present illness the review of systems those types of things the note sections are also going to have a text that the user enters themselves so I'm going to call this user entered text and we want to give them the ability to add variables um and so I'm going to call that I'm just going to call it variables now already I can begin to think about how I can see the difference between text that a user is entering in terms of like how that's going to work and how someone might want to enter a variable uh whereas you know they might we might need to think about a trigger key or something along those lines for a variable now in addition to this I'm going to be thinking about I'm going to change the color here but I'm going to think about what are the actions someone needs to perform on a section now I'm not even talking about the text itself I'm just talking about the section as a whole so I need to be able to add it of course and remove so I'll just add that all in one thing as kind of a grouping of actions I might also want to be able to save as a template right so we might want to give them the ability to do that and we probably need to be able to give them um some kind of ability to move or to edit the type of section so I'm going to say like editing and like moving I'll call editing and management and so already not only have I created more granularity behind what this type of uh kind of feature needs to be I've actually started thinking about not only the differences between the things that someone is going to be interacting with and the things they need to do to those things the actions they need to take and this is the key piece of object oriented ux object oriented ux is not just about what are these tasks in the flow it's about what are the things and what are the actions on those things now I'm actually I've only done this one column but I can make another column and call it type of section so I could I could actually make this now like kind of like a sub subset of the set of the types themselves and I can call this section types and then I could say like you know we want our history of present illness we want our You Know Chief complaint and I could go down the list that way as well now what are the actions that I can perform there well it could be renaming something right so like if you know we have we could standardize in terms of our data model that we want a user to be able to rename subjective to history present illness or something along those lines or we could say we want them to uh you know kind of be able to rename assessment to exam or something so we could give that customizability to the user but we wouldn't really get into that thought process with just the flow itself we would in fact have to create an entirely different flow and almost scope out an entirely different feature set to even begin to think about that and the other thing that I think object oriented ux can really help us understand is we get we go beyond what users tell us they think they want and we begin to understand what it is they're trying to do what are the goals behind actually interacting with these things rather than what are the tasks that they're already performing and that's what they think they want to do I hope that makes sense now I hope this helps I'm going to link some uh articles and things about object oriented ux down below um but I hope you can get an idea of how object-oriented ux can give you a really great overview and kind of help you understand the scope of a product much faster than creating just linear flows cam but on the same hand there's still this need for us to understand how someone is going to interact with these things where do we begin to get into the actual flow of information and the interaction patterns that dictate that information well if you want to learn about that you're going to have to wait for the next video and I hope you'll subscribe and leave a comment if this was really interesting to you but I really appreciate you watching and I will see you real soon foreign [Music]

Channel: Robert Floyd

Views: 7,384

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Id: ZQqYOrylBK0

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2022