I’ve spent my summer volunteering for AmeriCorps and I’ve been using my OOUX skills throughout. Let me show you how.
Getting buy-in for using OOUX‘s ORCA process (pronounced like ‘orca’ the whale) to solve complex challenges… can itself, be a challenge. At first glance it would appear to be “just another framework” full of its own complexities, and most people’s gut reaction to that is to just dismiss it. They’re used to the way they do things, and they don’t have time for change.
I get it, trust me.
But I would like to walk you through what it looks like to practice OOUX using the very tangible example of gardening. I am also happy to reassure you that it is not a framework to replace other frameworks…it’s simply a way of moving through challenges that gets you to the end result you’re looking for, faster.
And in the process of doing it, if you still want to spend hours, days, or weeks having meetings about meetings about meetings in a grueling effort to align stakeholders on even the simplest of complexities, you can. You honestly can. All you’d be doing is feeding more data into your OOUXey knowledge-base, anyway. It’s fine.
You can still do scrum. You can still be agile. You can still hold user interviews, synthesize qualitative research, journey map, etcetera. You don’t have to change anything about your current process(es) at all. OOUX is just like…umami for design & cross-functional collaboration with everyone else. It just makes it better, smoother, and more satisfying.
A little more context before I get started
In this section I explain what brought me to this experience, but if you’d rather just skip to the garden design process and how that compares to OOUX, this link will take you there.
I was laid off from my previous UX role at a software/web development company last August (2025…we got DOGE’d). Immediately following that, I started the OOUX masterclass, which my previous company so graciously sponsored.
It changed my entire viewpoint of what it means to actually do UX work, in the best way.
I said it before and I’ll say it again: it was like therapy for my career. I was sad to not be able to bring my newfound skills to the project I’d been on for the last three years, however, I have been EAGER to bring this knowledge to something new. And crazily enough, I’ve been hungry for something even more challenging than my last project (which was a legacy overhaul, by the way)…because now I know I can handle it like a boss.
Since the masterclass ended, to my surprise, I’ve struggled to land a role. I’ve had multiple interviews, and all of them left me feeling hopeful…like this is the one, I know it…but alas, the dreaded “we’ve decided to go in a different direction” was the outcome of all of them. My gut tells me it’s because I’m selling myself as an OOUX designer, and that is unfamiliar and sales-pitchey, perhaps…because for some reason OOUX isn’t at the forefront of software design (yet…it’s getting there, believe me).
This year of trying to find my place has been a struggle, and in large part, I blame AI (but maybe that’s just a scapegoat now. Maybe I just need to re-write my case studies…again).
So, one day I recieved a flyer on my door. It was from AmeriCorps READY, a program based out of Wayne State University. They were offering home services to improve my indoor air quality and mitigate flooding issues (I live in a flood-prone neighborhood). In addition to that, there was a flyer recruiting new members. I was intrigued.
I was exhausted from the screen, to be totally real with you. Exhausted from rejection after rejection. Exhausted from being ghosted by what felt like a hopeful opportunity.
AmeriCorps was offering a few things I desperately needed:
1 – Time spent outdoors & physical labor to get my body moving more often
2 – Work that helps people; work that makes a difference & enriches the soul
3 – Plants. Dirt. Greenery. Connection to nature in these trying times of my life.
So I joined. Some people thought I was crazy. Told me it was a step down. That it would distract me from my goals as a designer. Or worse…that I’m too old, because the only people who do stuff like that are recent college grads who still live with their parents. That last part may be true, but the best part about that is, I’ve been spending time with the youth in a way I never have before, and I’ve learned so much about Gen Z. And as a UX designer, knowing people is part of my job…so it’s been helpful to immerse myself in a different world (or as a C-Suite exec might say: the next generation of buyers).
Now to talk about what we’re here to talk about.
OOUX vs. Rain Gardening
I’m going to begin with just gardening, and OOUX will explain itself in the process. But if you’re asking yourself, what is a rain garden?… here is a really short video. If you don’t watch that, all you really need to know right now is that it’s basically just a regular flower garden that loooooves water.
So, when you’re deciding what to plant in a rain garden, there are quite a few different factors that you have to take into consideration:
- What plants will you choose?
- Do the plants you choose prefer full sun, full shade, or somewhere in the middle?
- How wet do they want their roots to actually get?
- Do they bring pests, pollinators, both, or neither?
- When do they bloom? And what color will they be?
- What kind of soil do they prefer?
- Will the plants I choose work together, or compete with one another?
- How tall do they get? How wide do they spread?
- Are the plants I choose native to my region?
- Are they toxic? Are they edible?
This is not an exhaustive list, but as you can see, it’s not as simple as deciding to just put some plants in the ground.
You want your plants to play well together, survive, thrive…year after year. You also probably want the garden to be aesthetically pleasing, especially in Michigan where a lot of our native super-plants just look like straight-up weeds.
There’s strategy involved here.
Since I’m coming to the end of my service term, I got to be the lead designer for today’s large-scale community garden project (the third of three in total that I’ve worked on this summer, all funded by multiple organizations in an effort to improve the natural habitat and quality of life for residents of Detroit).
Today’s garden was a large oval shape, roughly 30 feet wide and 60 feet in length. We needed to plant over 200 plants to fill up the space. Well, I’m no botanist, or horticulturist, or landscape designer…so I took this challenge to Figma, because that’s what I know best.
Step One – Catalog the Plants / Object Discovery
Since the plants are the most important thing that we are working with, you can consider them to be our objects (the O of ORCA).
I had to identify each plant from it’s baby-stage version to understand what I was working with, then cross-reference my identification with our spreadsheet of what we expected from recent nursery orders.
Step Two – Synthesize Plant Data / Attribute Discovery
Different plants have different characteristics, preferences, and needs, and as mentioned earlier, these things are important when planning a large-scale rain garden. This would be the A of ORCA; the attributes of the objects.
For this part, I created a Plant Card component and assigned properties to it based on the most important information that I specifically needed in order to design this garden well.
There are a few additional properties there filled with dummy text…because I anticipate wanting to expand upon these cards later as a printable card deck, for funsies (and because I actually am interested in becoming a Michigan native plant guru).
But for the end goal of being mentally prepped and ready to lay out the right plants in the right place in a timely fashion during installation day — within the hours of 9-5, excluding time for a lunch, some breaks, and time allotted for both supply packing + site prep + mulching + site cleanup + travel to/from the office & garden site — my main focus was making sure I knew the name, mature height, mature spread, and soil/light/water preferences for each plant in our inventory. In OOUX’s ORCA process, this is known as Prioritization, which is very effective in saving time.
I already knew that the location has sandy/loam soil everywhere. I already knew that the location gets full sun and doesn’t have any shady spots. I already knew the extent of the puddling/flooding/general wetness of the land. That helped me to eliminate the use of certain plants that have incompatible preferences with this land. In OOUX’s ORCA process, this is known as Elimination, which is also very effective in saving time.
Step Three – Planning the Garden / Representation
This step is in-line with ORCA’s Representation round, which is basically the same as rapid, low-fidelity wireframing.
I created an aerial-view diagram of the garden bed. Each square in the diagram represents 1 square foot. I also created circle objects for each plant and adjusted the size to represent the plant’s mature spread. Then I actually just copied & pasted the plant circles to match the quantity of what we had in our inventory, so I knew how many of each I was working with.
From there, I positioned the plant circles within the diagram, keeping the height in consideration; we wanted the tallest plants within the center so as not to hide the shorter ones. The plant cards were preemptively organized from tallest to shortest so I could do this part relatively fast.
The end result:
Step Four – LAUNCH!
The next day, I printed a few copies of my diagram and walked my team through the plan. And the execution went swimmingly (which I cannot say for our first two large-scale rain gardens). I made it clear that we didn’t have to follow the exact placement & quantity represented to a T; this was meant to be a guideline.
It helped the team immensely because all of us are new to all of these native plants. We haven’t memorized their characteristics or even what they look like. Regardless, we had to work fast and we had to get the job done. So having this plan — and knowing that the end result would be a hard-working native rain garden that improves the surrounding community — enabled us to get the job done fast and go home on time.
Here is the before:
And pictured below is the work/plant placement in progress.
(I actually forgot to get an after-picture because the day was so jam-packed with labour. After we finished placement of all the plants, we then had to actually plant them, followed by mulching throughout the garden.)
Out of Scope / Future Planning
We finished the garden — project director approved! But just before leaving, we realized we probably could have planted more of what we had on-hand. Native Michigan pollinator plants like to be packed-in densely. So we’ve decided to come back to this site next week and fill in some of the gaps.
Additionally (not pictured), after fully mulching the entire garden bed, we lost the path in the middle. It just blends right in to the rest of the garden. So we know we have to return and find a way to make the path stand out more.
Lastly, we didn’t have time to build the picnic tables, or a rain garden sign (to let the community know that this is a brand new garden that needs time to grow, and has a very positive long-term impact on their street, since this is a street that experiences exponential puddling during heavy rains, which the garden will mitigate).
These are all things that are not necessary to establish the solid foundation that we completed today. These are things that are nice-to-haves which we will be able to implement when time allows. But at least we know that our nursery order is in-ground; the roots will establish themselves and drink up the excessive roof runoff & puddling. Today, we launched an MVP garden that will NOT breakdown over time, but only get stronger.
Gardening vs. Software Design
I’m well aware that gardening and software design are wholly different in so many ways, but my goal with this article is this:
I am a problem solver, and I want to show it. It doesn’t matter what the challenge is. It doesn’t matter what the domain is.
I drank the koolaid with OOUX because I’ve studied it hard and I believe it’s the answer to the problem of cross-functional confusion, communication breakdown, misalignment, scope-creep, and all the difficult things that tend to pop up in software design. It’s given me the confidence to be able to look at any challenge and know how to take the first step to getting to a solution — and then, when I inevitably find myself in the weeds with complexity — OOUX has given me the ability to untangle those weeds in a rapid, rational way.
The biggest takeaway is this: you focus on your primary objects. The most important things you are working with, or that your users have to work with. You flesh out the attributes, you note object relationships, you discover and decide on the possible actions, and you go from there. You just keep discovering, building, prioritizing, eliminating, experimenting with representation, and so on and so forth.
For a more in-depth look at how I’ve used OOUX in actual digital design, take a look at my OOUX masterclass project case study.
If you want to learn more about how OOUX meshes well with Design Thinking, read my article that is about exactly that.
Side note: this article was written directly from my head at the end of a very long day. No AI was involved this time, not even to check my tone, as usual. It was meant to be conversational, and honest. Em dashes were used, because I have always used them, and to be honest, I’m mad that the em dash is now a sign of AI slop, because I find it very useful in writing — they help to create the tone of how I would speak IRL. Which is probably why they’re so prevalent in AI. Personification and all that.
Happy complexity-wrangling! 👋
