Over the last decade, a dramatic increase has been observed in the ability of individual experimental scientists to generate and store data, which has not been matched by an equivalent development of adequate data management tools. ZOO is a generic Desktop Experiment Management Environment under development that can be customized and placed on the desks of many scientists to manage their experimental studies. In this talk, we first describe the overall architecture of ZOO, and then focus on key features of its various components. We specifically emphasize aspects of its visual user interface, the object-oriented database server that is at the core of the system, and the experimentation manager that initiates the execution of experiments as a result of scientists' requests. Finally, we briefly discuss our experiences with the use of the current ZOO prototype in the context of plant-growth simulation experiments and NMR spectroscopy experiments.