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.

1. Experience Mindset: Moving from UI to Experiences

The first mindset to cultivate is the experience mindset, which is enabled by a profound belief that users care about experiences first, and the practitioner needs to deliberately craft and design every touchpoint of this experience. A great experience will delight the user and will make them appreciate how easy it is, how intuitive it is, and how it makes them feel valued.

The best experience is one where you don’t even need to interact with a UI. The best experiences are like magic where the system and the designers take away all the heavy load from the user.

To adopt this mindset, you need to immerse yourself to understand:

• The user(s): Who will be using the product or system your team is designing?
• Their journey: What are the steps they will take to get to the desired outcome?
• Their needs: What needs does the system address, and how does it move them along effectively?
• Their pain points: What pain points do they have to address to get to their intended outcome?
• Their context: What is the context in which they’ll be using the product or system?

A deliberate shift a practitioner needs to make is to break departmental silos in an organization because these are the single biggest killer of great experiences. Users don’t care how your organization is structured, how your departments are managed, or where the practitioner sits in the organization. All they care about is how they are engaging with your product and ecosystem and whether it is working for them. They expect you to earn their loyalty by thinking through every aspect of their experience.

2. Design Mindset: Connecting Empathy to Experimentation

The design mindset is often misunderstood. For most people, the word “design” conjures the visceral (small design) aspects of design that put form above the user’s need and context. On the contrary, the design mindset embraces design as a way to solve a specific problem by experimenting with every variable—both intrinsic and extrinsic to the system at hand.

This means the designer has to deeply empathize with the user, understand the problem that they are trying to address, and ideate and experiment around that problem before actually converging on a solution.

To have a design mindset, you need to:

• Empathize with: The user(s); and their journey.
• Frame the problem
• Understand the variables at play in the system (intrinsic and extrinsic)
• Experiment … experiment … experiment: Prototype, test, iterate

One huge shift that designers need to make is to stop thinking about screens and how the solution would look before truly understanding the needs of the user. Designers spend too much time designing to requirements, engineers spend too much time building features and enhancements to specification, and product managers spend too much time getting features to the market.

For every design problem, first, understand why the user needs a solution, and try to identify at least three ways for the user to get to their intended outcome.

3. Outcome Mindset: Focusing on Goals, Not Activities

The experience practitioner’s unique role in the organization is to engage with customers, frame problems, ideate, and design solutions. Carrying this out requires experience practitioners to have an outcome mindset: taking accountability for solving the overall user experience and business problem, not merely the discrete activities they create along the way. In simple terms, if a user or business has a design problem, until that problem has been solved and verified, the outcome has not been achieved. It may take days or months to get there, but it is not done until the problem has been thoroughly solved.

The goal is not to design six screen variations that look impressive in a presentation. The goal is to solve a root problem, where users can intuitively navigate through complexity and achieve their intended goal each and every time.

To adopt the outcome mindset, a practitioner must articulate, visualize, and measure the outcome they plan to achieve for:

• Your users;
• Your business.

In order to develop an outcome mindset, designers need to stop trying to measure impact by quantifying the hours they have worked and the screens they have created. Instead, the impact is achieved once they have verified and solved the user’s problem.

Adopting this mindset can accelerate a practitioner’s career in any growing organization.

4. Business Mindset: Show Me the Money!

The business mindset for practitioners is an acute understanding that businesses exist to make a profit by creating value for their users. If the experience mindset is the arrow, the business mindset is the target. And effective outcomes happen when arrow meets target.

In January 2007, Adobe launched a beta product for photographers. User research showed that many professional photographers were only using a small portion of the feature set in Adobe Photoshop. So Adobe launched a new product called Lightroom, which became a multimillion‐dollar product line that, most important, customers loved.

Most practitioners don’t fully understand the breadth of user‐related challenges their companies face, from product adoption to customer satisfaction to long‐term loyalty. A practitioner with the business mindset views any and all of these as an opportunity to create value in the system.

To utilize the business mindset, a practitioner must be able to:

• Clearly articulate business goals and connect whatever they’re doing to a business problem that matters; and
• Articulate the business’s value to its users.

5. Systems Mindset: Understand Complexity to Design Simplicity

The systems mindset is the philosophy and ability to understand any specific area of focus by understanding the system as a whole, through building a deep understanding of its components, interrelationships, patterns, and idiosyncrasies. As the complexity of technology and its capabilities continue to increase, the systems mindset helps practitioners understand it and tackle problems effectively.

To employ the systems mindset, the practitioner must consider all the:

• Users in the system before thinking of one specific user to focus on;
• Experiences in the system before thinking of one specific experience to focus on;
• Workflows in the system before thinking of one specific workflow to focus on;
• Screens in the system before thinking of one specific screen to focus on;
• Patterns in the system before thinking of one specific pattern to focus on.

Every UX practitioner should develop these five mindsets. Together, they establish a mental framework for empathizing with the user, ideating different solutions until you achieve the outcome, and driving clear business value across the system.