User Experience Design

CHAPTER 08MINDSETS OF A USER‐CENTRIC ORGANIZATION: What can we learn from a 15th century polymath

As organizations and practitioners evolve to catalyze business value through user experience design, their focus needs to shift to solving the user’s problems by leveraging different perspectives, not simply applying one tool or another. In essence they need to think like holistic problem solvers.

What Does That Look Like? Consider Leonardo da Vinci, the 15th Century Italian Polymath.

Leonardo painted masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. He was a visionary inventor, drafting sketches of a flying machine and a parachute. He also understood human anatomy so well that he designed the Vitruvian Man, well known for its anatomical and mathematical accuracy.

Now here’s someone who was always striving to learn new disciplines and explore new fields. No wonder he is known as a great artist, an engineer, a biologist, an astronomer, and a mathematician. He connected dots among seemingly unrelated fields like no one else. The other person in our generation who was able do this successfully was Steve Jobs who interestingly admired da Vinci’s ability to see beauty in both art and engineering.

Five Mindsets to Master

To apply Leonardo’s example to the digital renaissance we are now living in, practitioners and collaborators have to approach every problem differently. ...