Why I’m Closing the Doors on the Self-Paced Object-Oriented UX Masterclass
Big News and Two Business/Life Lessons
People call it life-changing, mind-blowing, and career-saving. I’ve been so pleased to discover that this little venture I started with the goal of helping frustrated UX designers make technology less annoying, has taken off. To quote Sally Field, you like me! You really like me! 😅
More and more people are enrolling in the course every month. I’m so proud of this course and, to be frank, enrolling three to five students a week is a massive chunk of our livelihood. But with that said, I’m still going to take it off the shelf starting on September 27th.
Why?
Well, before I go any further, I want you to know if you are already enrolled, don’t panic! Of course, you’ll still have lifetime access to the content, along with anyone who enrolls before we close, as promised. We are not shutting down the course — we’re simply closing the doors to new enrollments temporarily.
Because we have work to do.
One of the best things about the OOUX Masterclass is how challenging it is — it really does stretch and expand your UX-mind to new capacities. Tackling complexity is hard and when you learn Object-Oriented UX, you’re pushing your skills beyond what “normal” UXers can do. This is great for advancing your career and being a UX badass…but tough to do without support.
Fun fact — the Self-Paced OOUX Masterclass — a trove of video content, templates, and resources — was never designed to be used alone. I designed the material as the “textbook” for the OOUX Certification — my hands-on 10 week training program.
It wasn’t until people started requesting “just the videos” that we realized that we could offer the course materials without all the live support.
It gave us a source of passive income (yay!) and made this “‘secret weapon’ for managing complexity,” as OOUX superstar Karen Hewell coined it, more accessible to more people. Win win!
But here’s the thing. It’s really hard to get through this course without expert support.
It’s like learning physics by reading the textbook but never going to class, never hitting up office hours, and never working with the TA. It’s absolutely doable — and maybe twice a week I get an alert that someone just completed the course. They post awesome testimonials like this:
“This class was a doozy, but man did I learn some incredibly useful frameworks and ways of thinking! Information architecture always intimidated me, but now I have a systematic process to tackle complexity with confidence. I don’t want to seem like I’m over selling it, but it really does feel like OOUX gives you the ability to see into the Matrix! Connections and pathways that previously were hidden or blocked, now seem abundantly obvious to design around for the user. I’m super excited to start applying the principles of OOUX in my work and see what doorways open up! 😎”
-Evan Prince
But I still want a better completion rate — I want everyone to get through the material and reap the rewards. So that’s why we are temporarily closing the doors — we want to redesign what it means to be self-paced. Because self-paced shouldn’t also mean “on your own.”
LESSON ONE: stick to the mission and stick to your values.
For us, the #1 mission is to help people learn OOUX so that they can upgrade their professional lives —
Practice stronger UX…
Facilitate awesome collaboration…
Save their companies and their users all those headaches that plague our industry: scope changes, rework, miscommunication, and myopic short-term thinking to name a few.
Plus, and not least of all, the more people using OOUX, the less annoying technology will be. More and more, I want to see the fingerprints of OOUXers in the software that I use. That’s the goal!
When you’re in the weeds of running a business or working within a team, it’s so easy to lose sight of your goals. I know how cliche this all sounds but just as a gentle reminder:
Has your strategy crept away from the ultimate goal? Psst — this can happen in life, too. Every few years, even every few months, most businesses will need a course correction. When we are in it, it’s easy to get blown around by the winds of vanity metrics and the urgency of the search for more money.
Step back.
Reassess.
Course correct.
LESSON TWO: Prioritize lead metrics, not lag metrics.
Piggybacking on Lesson One — watch out for getting hypnotized by lag metrics, the metrics you have less control over. Sales. Followers. Likes. These are the often-quantitative metrics that feel “easy” to track and usually point to an outward semblance of success. They are easy to chase, easy to get obsess over, and counter-intuitively, focusing too much on lag metrics often doesn’t even improve them.
Lag metrics will improve when you focus on lead metrics. The metrics you can actually control. They are more difficult to capture, more nuanced to improve, and often more cringy to look at. Satisfaction, implementation of feedback/research, how much your product is actually improving your users’ lives.
When we focus on improving the product so that it makes our users even more badass, naturally, our lag metrics will follow. Sure, marketing is super-important for any business and we do need to track lag metrics — but they shouldn’t lead. They are just a lagging sign of how well we are doing on our lead metrics.
In 2022, we put out a big update of the course, refilming about a third of the videos. Now, it’s time for another big push on improving this already-phenomenal-if-I-do-say-so-myself course.
When we reintroduce the course, it will include some form of accountability and support beyond the Q&As and community that we already provide. Everyone who’s already enrolled will get access to all the new features at no extra cost — but for the next couple months we’re taking a break from new enrollments to focus on innovation and upgrades.
So, if you’ve been considering the OOUX Masterclass for a long time and you don’t want to have to wait until next year please make sure to enroll before September 27th. You can start going through the material now, and perhaps you’ll rock-and-roll on your own. Then, if you hit some snags, you’ll be able to leverage our new support system next year.
Got questions? Comment on this article or message me on any of the other channels where we are connected!
