Halftank Fuel: Building my own product the OOUX way 💙

"Now What?"

This week I finished my certification program as an Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) Strategist. If this is something that you are interested in, the course is well worth the tuition.

The course is NOT easy, as you will be challenging the ways that you think about products and user experience. You will be looking at products in a systems-thinking way, considering the product as a whole instead of the industry standard piecemeal feature-forward approach. It may sound obvious, but looking at a product as a whole first then breaking the work down into phases is the path to creating successful products that customers will love.

This week I am asking myself “now what?”. Since I originally got certified three years ago, the product and user experience landscape has gotten considerably murkier. I, like many others, was laid off from my consulting position earlier this year. This is the kick in the butt that I needed to open my own business, but that process has not been an easy one. Lately it has been a struggle to convince companies that good user experiences are worth the investment.

Companies have been stripping down product and user experiences budgets and departments down to the bone, if not eliminating them altogether. There are so many great designers and strategists out of work.

I believe that you can see the results of this, especially with social media sites, that are designed to exploit users as revenue bases instead of helping users solve problems. If you went into the user experience field thinking that you were going to help people, these recent trends have likely been demoralizing. They certainly have been for me.

This is the product landscape that we are in, and for a long time it has been making me question my career choices.

That all said, I know that there is a path forward. For me at this moment, this means that creating my own products instead of creating products for another company.

For a while now I have had in mind a product to help people manage multiple home renovation projects. As someone who is renovating two houses, including one 500 miles away, I haven’t found what I really needed:

• ONE place to keep documentation, including images, on renovation projects. No more photos buried in emails and texts
• A place to compare multiple estimates for the home improvement jobs where estimates are necessary
• A place to record which jobs need to be finished before others can begin
• A place to record one’s own do-it-yourself projects alongside the professionally done jobs

And so I am building a digital product of my own. Creating for a solution for the problems I listed above was my project for getting certified in my OOUX course, and I am taking that work and making it real. For the moment, I am building an MVP version of this product, which will be a Notion template that will become available soon (I am including some work-in-progress screens here). After that, I will work on creating a SaaS version of this product that could allow for client/contractor communication (hopefully).

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I believe that the phrase that describes this process is “eating my own dog food”. I intend to show how OOUX works by building my own product, the OOUX way. Thanks to everyone reading this for following along as I got OOUX re-certified, and there are exciting things ahead. If you are interested in how OOUX can help you and your products, please drop me a line. I still am in this business to help people :)