How to use the OODA Loop in UX design
As a former Navy pilot, I came to love and lean on the OODA Loop to help me assess situations, decide responses, and act quickly. The OODA Loop is a powerful tool with a place inside an airplane cockpit and the design process that can help supercharge your decision-making.
What is the OODA Loop?
The OODA Loop is a model for decision-making created by former US Air Force Colonel John Boyd. He used this model to help him understand how he could think faster than his opponents during dogfights.
The loop consists of the following steps: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The idea is that constantly observing your surroundings will allow you to continually decide what you need to do next, and continuously acting upon those decisions will lead you to success.
How does the OODA Loop work in UX design?
Like the OODA Loop, the design process is a continual process of observing, making decisions, and iterating on those decisions to create products based on user feedback. Every step in this process is an opportunity for you to observe your surroundings, orient yourself, decide what to do next, and then act accordingly.
When designing the user experience of a product, it’s essential to have a plan before beginning the design process. Think about how you want your user to feel before they’ve even used your product or service. What are their expectations? What questions might they have? This beginning phase is where the observation stage comes in handy.
Next, orient yourself by considering what will likely happen when people use your product or service. How will they navigate through it? What problems will they encounter? Sometimes understanding where people are likely to get stuck can help you find new insights about your product’s functionality.
Once you’ve decided on an action plan, make sure it aligns with your goals for the project and fulfills the needs of your audience (or customers). The decision stage of the OODA Loop is all about making smart decisions that align with your goal and fulfill customer needs. After deciding on a course of action, take action, see if it works, and start the loop again!
How does using the OODA Loop help you as a designer?
As a UX designer, you are constantly observing your user’s reactions to your design and then deciding what you need to do next. Applying the OODA Loop to your UX design process will allow you to continually make informed decisions on what you need to do next. By leveraging this feedback loop — the continual process of observing, assessing, and acting will help you make better decisions faster, allowing you to iterate quicker, and deliver more helpful solutions for your users.
Here are two examples showing how the OODA Loop impacts UX designers:
1) Observing users’ reactions
The first way is by watching how users react when interacting with your designs and considering changes accordingly. For example, when designing an online form, the designer might observe users clicking on each field and filling it out incorrectly. The designer would then decide they should add more guidance for the user (i.e., labels) or even remove that particular field altogether if it is unnecessary.
2) Making decisions based on observations
The second way the OODA Loop impacts UX designers is by helping them make decisions in real-time when designing their interface and giving them a clear direction of where to take their design next. For example, suppose a UX designer observes that users struggle with understanding an icon she created. In that case, she can decide to change the icon, re-think the usage, or redesign the flow altogether.
Conclusion
In this article, I explained how you could use the OODA Loop in your UX design process. Hopefully, you found it helpful and can apply it to your next project 🛫!
