97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 26. Think Synthetically to Design Systematically

Drew Condon

As UX practitioners, analytical thinking is so essential to our work we’re often not even aware we’re doing it. Analysis is a fantastic way to understand parts and pieces of a user’s experience, but it’s not as appropriate for understanding how those parts work together to deliver the experience.

When breaking experiences down, we can often lose sight of the interactions between the parts. As those interactions become less and less visible, our instinct can be to increase analysis of the pieces by breaking them down further. When we do this, we risk getting caught in a cycle of analysis. In trying to better understand the parts, we increase our distance from the whole. (See Gary Bartlett’s “Systemic Thinking” paper.)

Sometimes we need help understanding interactions and how things work together. One approach is synthesis or synthetic thinking. Synthesis is a great tool for sensemaking; it provides us some clarity about how experiences work, or ought to work, together. Synthesis is about finding similarities and deliberately designing usable patterns across an experience.

UX practitioners need both ways of thinking, but the importance and utility of synthesis increases as the size and complexity of the things we work on grow and become more oriented toward systems.

Large technology platforms in particular rely ...