Why Create Products From a UX Mindset?
Title card - UX Mindset - Why it’s useful for business, art, design, and engineering.
Every person using their skills in business, design, engineering and creative work has their way of looking at the work. Every role has a mindset.
UX Mindset is about making user centered design useful and approachable to a wide variety of disciplines. It emphasizes including others in your product making decisions.
Where does this UX Mindset come from?
How do you describe something that you have been learning over a long period of time? When all along the way you are noticing what is so useful about what you are learning and how you are applying it. For me, I journal and talk about it. I don't think it's predictable when you reach a greater clarity and utility but it's achievable by putting your ideas together and to putting them use. Reflect on the situation, gather new insights and keep on refining, building, sharing.
Sharing the benefits of human centered design is something I care about. I've helped teams and companies do better work, make more meaningful products for their audience, and learn to work together better. It's pretty great being in that situation and I want to share that so others can be too.
I've been calling this whole human and systemic way of thinking UX Mindset. It combines value systems across business, design, engineering and art. The goal is to help us all make more inclusive and credible decisions. Better decisions to improve what we make and how we make it.
Each of our skills and roles comes with a way of looking at the world. What problems we see matter, the ones we ignore also matter. Describing different mindsets makes it so we can understand better how all of us see what matters.
UX Mindset embraces approachable beginner design awareness, caring, and skills and connects collaboratively with other mindsets.
UX Mindset occurred to me over a long time. For about 20 years practicing human centered design, kind creative collaboration, thinking in systems through consulting and full time employee roles as a UX strategist, generalist, researcher, designer, and leader. First hand experience and practice helps me feel prepared to describe a few mindsets in particular: business, design, engineering, creative.
How can such different roles and skills relate and benefit from UX mindset?
Business, Engineering, Design, and Creative Mindsets
Every role in business, design, engineering and creative highlights habits and ways of valuing:
- Points of view framing choices and opportunities in the product design process.
- What is rewarded and celebrated for that role
- Vocabulary and jargon about using their skills.
Think of how we all have a focus for why we define our roles as we do. Also how we accept others definitions of what their roles are about.
Every role has a mindset.
Every role mindset is a tool that helps manage putting your skills to use where they matter most. I hope this set of perspectives is enough to relate to one or more of the skills you care about.
- Business mindset is to profit from an exchange. Gather people and what they need, put them in a position to succeed. Return profit or benefits in that exchange. Two flavors of business mindset I've experienced are discovery and optimization. By nature and practice I'm more of an explorer practicing discovery but can see positive times and places for optimization. Discovery finds new kinds of business, optimization often takes a working business and makes it more profitable.
- Engineering mindset is to build a better world by knowing how to construct and solve problems. Whether mechanical, electrical, or software engineering is a broad brush that contains many kinds of makers. It's also many ways of seeing the process of making. Some of the difference can be caring about different scales of operations. Other differences are about prototyping vs. verified tested readiness. Engineering and business mindsets can make big things happen so well that in some organizations they are the focal value systems missing out on wider perspectives that integrate more human factors through design and creativity.
- Design mindset is to discover needs and constraints among humans and systems to compose a credible path to accomplish goals. It's about being intentional and inclusive of people, needs, and why given solutions are best fit for all constraints. Design mindset is more related to engineering than many designers and engineers notice. UX Mindset comes from design to include human centeredness and awareness of human factors. Also includes systems thinking which gives a foundation for seeing how a wider informed perspective leads to stronger more credible decisions. UX Mindset is portable outside of design. It's better for products and audiences if we can share a way of looking at things more in common.
- Creative mindset is to shape emotion and aesthetics into a work of art taking what's inside you expressing it into medium for others to see. Creativity can live in anyone with any skillset. It's about how you put those skills to use. It uses a creative lifecycle to take some thing from concept idea to concrete manifestation. We see and expect creative mindset from illustrators, storytellers, videographers, writers, art directors. Other roles can also be creatively skilled and accomplished. Business focused people can be novel in how they see and compose financial problems in a spreadsheet or how they describe a business opportunity in a pitch for funding. Same is true for engineers and designers.
Sketch considering overlapping points of view, showing some work in progress diagramming of how UX Mindset connects with business, engineering, design, and creative mindsets.
Who gets to say they have a UX Mindset?
Do you and your team learn and use what you learn to make more meaningful things together?
Just getting started? That's okay too. You can start by learning do-it-yourself style or bring in experts. Doing both works even better. Connecting these value systems is real work that someone needs to make happen to collaborate with your team, organization, and audience.
Do you believe it matters to include others in your decisions? Then do you do the work to include them, learn from them, and use what you learn? Then you're acting out of a UX Mindset.
Call yourself UX Mindset certified at that point and I will celebrate and agree with you.