Halftank Fuel: OOUX re-certification update and why constraints are good! 💪⛳️

I'm almost re-certified!

I wanted to go over how I prioritized this app I’ve been working on to help people manage home improvement projects. I am almost ready to sketch out my solution and I wanted to go over why I went through this process instead of sketching at the very start of a project as many designers do.

I’ve been a designer of both websites and apps for a very long time and what I’m trying to do with this process, the object-oriented user experience process, is getting clarity on the sorting and prioritization of the information I need to lay out.

I’m doing this because I’m trying to give myself some constraints for this project. There’s a misconception that if you’re not a designer, constraints are somehow bad. They’re not!

As a designer, I’m always looking for constraints. I’m looking for a client’s brand colors. I’m looking for user interviews and user forums to see what confuses people. If I don’t do that, and I’ve worked at places like this, where your stakeholders aren’t giving you a vision of what they want to do. In place of direction, often they will say, “Oh, well, this competitor does this, have a look at them.” When a designer hears this, they’ll just go to the competitor’s site and, because they don’t have any direction, they’ll essentially redesign your competitor’s site, which isn’t great if you’re trying to do your own thing.

Soon, I’m going to work on sketching out what my estimates are going to look like because that’s going to be a big part of this home improvement management application. There’s no way that I’ve found online where you can look at multiple estimates side by side to compare. So what I’ve done with my prioritization is blocking out the information I need to progressively disclose as you are going through the app.

A very looooong image of a prioritized object map below:

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I’ve got mini cards, cards, and then further below, I have detail pages, additional phases, etc. I have prioritized these chunks of information by where they will be shown. For example, an estimate will have first a mini-card (or a table row) that includes the name, a status such as is it was sent or not sent when it was created, and what property it was for.

I need to note here that I’ve got two different types of users: a user client, and then a user who created the estimate because there are going to be views for contractors and views for property owners. I will account for both roles when I sketch.

For larger cards and detail pages, I’ll display whether the estimate was accepted, obviously the price, and then things like, file attachments, like, there’s a lot of PDFs that itemize everything that’s in an estimate, I want to have a space for that, as well as a space for related estimates, and space for descriptions and notes.

In short, I am using the object-oriented UX process to gather constraints because I want to create something new, different, and ultimately useful to people. If you take nothing else from this, it’s that constraints are good! Let me know what you think, or if you want this level of usable detail for your project.