Halftank Fuel: How to understand any business in one afternoon 👀🔎

I’ve been a consultant for years, and working for many clients in different industries can be challenging. As a certified Object-Oriented UX Strategist, I have a great tool in my toolkit that helps me understand any new client, in any industry, very quickly.

The first thing I do when I get a new client is do a quick-and-dirty Nested Object Matrix (NOM) based on what the new client has made public through their website and social channels.

Step 1: Noun Foraging

I first go to the client’s “About Us” page and print it out. If the About Us page is pretty short, I also check out the client’s YouTube and LinkedIn Channels for general information about the company. I also print those out - for YouTube I put transcripts in a Google doc to print.

Once I have everything printed out, I search for the nouns that show up over and over. I highlight those nouns in blue.

Step 2: Affinity Map

Once I have my raw list of highlighted nouns, I go to Miro (or any similar tool) and put each of my nouns on a blue sticky note. I take those sticky notes and quickly create an affinity map to get groups of related nouns. For example, “user”, “person”, and specific job titles would be in one group that I would name, in ALL CAPS, according to the noun that showed up most often.

The goal of my affinity map is to narrow down my list of raw nouns into no more than the four or five most important, most mentioned nouns.

Step 3: Turning Nouns into a Nested Object Matrix

I take my four or five narrowed-down nouns to create a Nested Object Matrix.

To make my Matrices in Miro (or similar), I copy my blue sticky notes into column and row headers. I put in blank blue sticky notes for my cells, so you will have 20 stickies if you have four objects or 25 if you have five.

In those blank sticky notes, I guess the relationship between each cell’s two reference objects. For example, if I were looking at a publication that had AUTHOR, ISSUE, ARTICLE, and PHOTO as the objects, I would note the relationships like this:

• Has 0-1, as in an ARTICLE has 0-1 ISSUES it is featured in (it is 0-1 in this theoretical case to account for ARTICLES that have not yet been published)
• Has 1, as in an ARTICLE has 1 AUTHOR who writes it
• Has 0-many, as in an ARTICLE has 0-m PHOTOS that are featured in it (in this theoretical case, this also identifies PHOTOS as optional objects)
• Has 1-many, as in an AUTHOR has 1-many ARTICLES that they have written

If you are pressed for time, for where the two reference objects are the same object - i.e. the AUTHOR row in the AUTHOR column - you can leave those blank. You can see in my Miro screenshot that I opted to put questions in italics:

By doing this exercise, I can quickly discover the core business needs of any client by documenting my best guess of the relationships of the important nouns that will eventually define objects in the client’s system. I take this knowledge to my initial client interviews to start a deep dive into defining the work that the client needs. Having my Nested Object Matrix truly helps me ask the questions that spark deeper conversations and unite teams.

If you try this exercise for your company, your side project, or your passion project, and it sparks curiosity, get in touch.

I hope that you all have a lovely and peaceful holiday season! 🎄