Over the years, I have heard people have this view of Analytic thinking as the opposite side of Holistic Thinking. To me, that means if we are too analytic, we may have risks of only focusing on a small portion of the problems and losing the big picture, if we only are holistic, then we might have risks of overlooking details.

Analytic VS Holistic Thinking

People have different ways of approaching problems. One of the most important distinctions is between analytic and holistic styles. “Analytic thinking involves understanding a system by thinking about its parts and how they work together to produce larger-scale effects. Holistic thinking involves understanding a system by sensing its large-scale patterns and reacting to them.” a quote from an article from a psychology association. I am hesitant in I agree analytic/holistic thinking is the most important distinction of approaching problems.

In my job, I often use both thinking approaches to solve complicated problems, especially when I design enterprise products. How? Before jumping to a decision, I would like to ask questions to get more context in understanding the bigger problems and then look into a focal point to start solving problems. In reality, we might call that focal point as priorities, key metrics, user pain points, etc. The big pictures could be user journey and product roadmap etc.

So I would say that two patterns of approaching problems happen in parallel and they are not necessary to separate our ways of thinking apart unless I am a rare mix of analytic thinker and holistic thinker, which is very likely a truth.

Give you an example, when designing enterprise apps(internal tools) what does it mean by holistic design. Instead of designing directly by what stakeholder has asked for, encourage them to step back, and we can ask deeper questions to understand the goals, the pain point, the business objectives, the roadmap, and then we can research cross-functional workflow(collaboration) or any dependence between departments. we want to design a request for change feature, the holistic design is to make sure we think the entire workflow and not just the direct user, we need to holistically design a workflow that would consider what happened before or after users submit a request, and how the other parties will react on the request and then what the feedback loop of the request and how the app reacts to the feedback loop.

But I accidentally read about an article saying Analytic thinking is the opposite side of Holistic Thinking. To me, that means if we are too analytic, we may have risks of only focusing on small potion of the problems and losing the big picture, if we only be holistic, then we might have risks of overlooking details.

What does it mean when I say holistic thinking as a designer?

For example, when designing enterprise apps(internal tools) what does it mean by holistic design: 1 Principle: Not design by the ask, what I mean by that it is to instead of design directly by what stakeholder has asked for, encourage them to step back, and we can ask more profound questions to understand the goals, the paint point, the business objectives, the roadmap, and then we can research about cross-functional workflow(collaboration) or any dependence between departments. For example, we want to design a request for a change feature; the holistic design makes sure we think the entire workflow. Not just the direct user, we need to holistically create a workflow that would consider what happened before or after users submit a request, and how the other parties will react to the request, and then what the feedback loop of the request and how the app react on the feedback loop.

The article, it says different people have different ways of approaching problems. One of the most important distinctions is between analytic and holistic styles. Analytic thinking involves understanding a system by thinking about its parts and how they work together to produce larger-scale effects. Holistic thinking involves understanding a system by sensing its large-scale patterns and reacting to them.

I am not sure if I agree analytic/holistic thinking is the most important distinction of approaching problems.

I clearly use both thinking approaches to solve problems. I believe other people might do the same things. You have to form some understanding of big problems, and then look into a focal point to start solving problems. In reality, we might call that focal point as priorities, key metrics, user paint points, etc. The big pictures could be user journey and product roadmap etc.

So I would say that two patterns of approaching problems happen in parallel and they are not necessary to separate our ways of thinking apart unless I am a rare mix of analytic thinker and holistic thinker, which is very likely a truth.

What do you think? Do you think if you are a more analytic thinker or you are a more holistic thinker?

Here is an article about the analytic_vs_holistic_thinking

(http://www.intropsych.com/ch07_cognition/analytic_vs_holistic_thinking.html)

It happened a year ago. Don’t ask my why it took me a year to finish this writing. That is a very long story, which I am probably going to publish it later.

Let’s focus on this one first.

Here we go:

A year ago, I got an interview with a financial startup. At the last round interview, I was asked to design what is integration like for a trading app on Yahoo Finance.

Below was what they wanted:

“In light of our new product in the pipeline that allows end users to open brokerage accounts as a native experience and based on your review of Yahoo Finance, what recommendations do you have for how an end user would access the account opening workflow from the existing Yahoo Finance build? What ideas do you have? How would that work? Please come up with a concept or two and define them.”

Within a few days, I delivered an Yahoo Finance app UX audit and also hi-fidelity mockups for blue sky ideas.

What is the current integration like?

User click buy/sell, and then get to see “select broker accounts” page

Pros: The assumption is buy/sell is the most important call to action at this page. So only showing users the most important thing one step a time helps users learn how to use app to trade more easily.

Cons: no of visibility of the “link broker”, lack of consistency with the other entry point at my profile page

Consider to replace “buy and sell button” with “ Link broker accounts to start trade”

Consider to show a pop-up message

to invite users link broker accounts right after they follow/favorite/share a stock.

From the user journey map, users more likely react positively to the pop-pop message when they perform follow/favorite/share actions.

Link broker accounts are not prominent enough.

Consider adding a different visual treatment to draw

Users’ attention.

Lack of visibility on the home page:

1. Consider pushing pop-up message
2. Consider adding a clear call to action on the homepage
3. Consider adding a banner
4. Consider adding a tab for open accounts

The Solution

Human is visual animals. Instead of listing the names, using logos, which are are more visual. It not only enrich visual interests, but improve usability as well.

My Proposals

I presented my proposal to VP of product and PMs, they loved it so much and I almost feel like they were going to implement the concept right away. They were like “ We were discussing the integration experience with Yahoo Finance a few days ago, they were mentioning similar things, let’s review it with engineers.” They brought engineers in the room and we started discussing tech capability. That was good to hear, it seem to me that I had the same vision as what Yahoo Finance team had.

Result?

During that interview process, I got another offer on the table which seemed more interested to me and I ended up taking that offer. Although I didn't get to see my concept was implemented or not, the key take-away from this experience is it built up my confidence, or at least having similar kind of tastes as the experts at Yahoo Finance team.

Recently I studied oil portrait class at School of Visual Art. Never working on oil painting before, I developed strong passion in understanding the beauty of oil painting: You can play with color anyway you want. In water-color painting, you play with water and let the water control the pigment. In oil painting, you can mix and repaint color to form 3D format. It gives me a chance to sharp my eyes to recognizing all those beautiful subtle colors. Capturing these life colors is so much fun!

I started portrait painting with life models. Look carefully for the colors on life models, you will be amazed by how many color you get to use with oil paintings and how many color on the models you never recognized before.

The problem-solving skills apply really well to the portrait painting process. First, breakdown the complex 3D format into fundamental shapes, and add secondary variables, and keep iterate the drawing to form a 3D shape.

Here is one of my piece. I tracked the painting process.

How User Experience Design fit into B2B business? -A Year Review in 2015

Why I work for a B2B industry?

When being interviewed in LabVantage, I got to see a complex and highly configurable B2B web app for scientists in labs, and I was told that NASA had been using it to develop space suites. I immediately imagined how it interacts with scientists in space industry. I am a UX/UI designer who is hopelessly in love with science.

I had been through some job hunting drama in 2014. After waiting for months, the offers from world leading banks and financial firms did not come. Until I got an offer from LabVantage, I was like “Why not become a scientists’ advocate and designing something good for science this time”? If I can design an easy to use application that NASA would use to do some awesome space projects, my dream would come true! Yeah! Let’s do this! I accepted the offer and become the first and only UX designer who ever worked at this long established tech company. My journey begins here……

Impressed stakeholder

From R&D team, to Marketing team, Sales team, even HR team, UX design is very new, exciting, but unfamiliar. But I understand why they get that impression. My portfolio looks is more of an art portfolio — if they don’t dig into my design process, they will easily get the perception that UX design is something creative that is produced organically. Trained as a designer from an engineering institution, design process was defined as a problem-solving process, similar to that of mathematical problem-solving. I never got tired of educating stakeholders what is UX design and how it can benefit our product.

The overall UI of a B2B (business-to-business) application is pretty outdated. You may say that there are a lot of design opportunities since the bar is pretty low. However, B2B applications usually bounded by industry regulations or comes with a series of complex workflows. LabVantage is a widely used software in the areas of pharmaceutical, clinical trials and manufacturer labs. We can easily make improvements on its 70s Microsoft alike user experience. However, where to start, what to change, why do we need to change, and how do we educate customers to accept these changes? These questions force myself to think critically all the time. Some decisions are no brainer, such as changing the typography to improve readability and consistency, but changing without rationale means risks to the business. People were skeptical about changes and that might turn the customers away. To move things forward and push the changes through, I found that using presentation as proposal works really well, and it made each change looks professional and convincing.

Even with well thought presentations, rejections from different point of view always lie on my table. I get to learn to listen to feedback, and how to elaborate and illustrate my idea. A picture is worth a thousand words, therefore, I used sketches, flowcharts, user stories, prototypes as the communication tools to convey my visions. The PM and Dev have been very supportive and always exchange their thoughts on the design with me. Although I was inspired from their feedback, but user-centric design is not only about inspiration and creativity. At the end of the day, I am the user advocate, if I don’t speak for the users, no one else will do.

I remembered that during a company event, a painting night, I drew the Van Gogh’s starry night. It was the first time I paint the picture and everyone says it was really impressive! The next day, the whole company started to describe me as “she was the one who drew the starry night!”. Since then, the stakeholder interview with external departments seems a little easier. The time spent on drawing lots of animation cartoon (as my secret hobby) has finally paid off.

Focus on Usability

A good user experience is not just about look and feel. I still remember vividly the documentary about a tragic airplane crash I watched 15 years ago. That crash made me to start thinking about Human Computer Interaction, “They could have designed a better interface, so that pilot was not confused between different flying modes and people would not have not died!”; according to Wikipedia, the Air Inter Flight 148 crashed in 1992 and 87 out of the 96 crew and passengers on board were killed. And the primary factor? Poor UI Design. There were two flight modes: Vertical Speed Mode and Flight Path Angle mode. These two displays were so similar that it is almost impossible to differentiate them. Thus, pilot inadvertently left the plane in a wrong flight mode. After further investigation, programmers modified the interface to prevent confusion with the Flight Path Angle mode. Every time when I have been through a tough battle, I always remind stakeholders to not to use any ambiguous design as the risk for users errors are high. Form a deep empathy as a user advocate, and I committed to bring them an easy-to-use product.

Another fun part was being a UX team of one, I had been thinking the similarities between cognitive styles in psychology and strategies in design thinking; Analytic vs. Holistic Thinking. I believe it usually takes both thinking methods to comprehensively approach problems and create design solution.

How to measure the success of design?

After eight months of critical usability review, it is time to collect data on how the design improves user experience and increases users satisfaction. LabVantage Inc has an annual customer education and technology conference, and there are around a hundred customers coming from all over the world. Since it is the first time we demonstrate the new software and they don’t have time to fully experience the system, I was only testing two metrics: attractiveness and clarity, so we did not test efficiency and dependability. The survey was structured with nine items scaled from 1 to 7 and 1 feedback textbox. We got 5.73 out of 7 with a standard deviation of 0.93, from 34 participants. I also talked to one of our major customers, Mayo Clinics and Labs Inc. I was glad to hear that they appreciated the design and got excited while using it. What exceeded my expectation was that the leadership team were also thrilled to see this data. At that moment, I knew that data was very helpful when communicating with stakeholders who don’t have strong design background. I still believe in my gut and be confident in making design decisions. But thanks to the data, 5.73 out of 7 , all my hard work in the experiments, the debates, and my patience, are worth. As I learned from Dantley Davis, Design Director of Netflix, to most of stakeholders, data is believed to be relatively unbiased, therefore they tend to believe data driven design.

I actually haven’t gotten a chance to visit NASA or to interview users from NASA. All I know about NASA is how they use our system according to my managers and business analysts. I should have asked for more opportunities to be get closer to it.

A big thank you to the R&D and PM, and also my best friend, the customer support team. They know the best of how our users actually use the system. I am proud to be part of the process to transform a traditional B2B system into a modern, easy to use product. Special mention to my mentor, Anthony Viviano, my former manager Puneet, VP of Product and Gabe, Chief Technology office. Without their support and inspiration, I could not grow and achieve so much within a year.

Some inspiring articles

http://blog.martindoms.com/2011/01/24/poor-ui-design-can-kill/

http://alistapart.com/article/ux-for-the-enterprise

http://alistapart.com/article/object-oriented-ux

Some books for young designers

• A Project Guide to UX Design
• 100 things every designer need to know about people
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Articulating Design Decisions
• Don’t make me think

Now I am looking forward to joining a talented team and devoting my solid design skills and analytical & creative thinking skills to building world-class, cross-platform digital products. Need a talented designer? Shoot me an email: joannewangdesign@gmail.com

If you enjoy this article, please share it. You can also follow me on Dribbble, Twitter.

Thank Harper Reed, Lau Cherham, and Vlad Klym for proofreading.

Thanks for reading!

What a journey, NASA had been really close was originally published in Interactive Mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Now I fall in love with you, Facebook! Hi Friends,this is how you pronounce my name (at least the closet one I get)! If any of you have trouble writing you name in English, try this feature on ‪#‎facebook‬, such a sweet feature. Although,the experience would be more consistent if the preview button is on the right rather than on the left.

Women are born as summer flowers. When they become mothers, they need to keep balance between different roles. To convey this message, I paint a watercolor piece and name it “Mother” for my mother and all the mothers.

Happy Mothers day! Check it on my Etsy store

Additional thinking

As a user experience designer, being empathy and grateful really help me do a better job. When being user advocate, I can feel their pain points and therefore tell their stories. I feel confident to convince stakeholders using engaging user stories. My job is kind of an art. We fight, we debate, we design, we critique and we see we will end up with more powerful products.

I guess that mindset also affects my daily life. Like Mothers Day, I relate to mothers roles, concerns about their pain point and truly advocate for them. The differences are I do watercolor painting, not user stories, wireframes and whiteboard or personas.

It starts with “Here’s how easy it is to get online” hmm, very human, very friendly

The result list shows you all the available choice above the folder. Again no redundancy information. The design of checkout window stick on the right side reflects one of the best practices in e-commerce web design.

To reduce loading additional pages, it is nice to use a pop up box.

Can you see what is going on here? It is loading the next page. The little dot really challenges my patients. I feel it is no friendly cause that small dot is not noticeable enough. It is not fun to watch it for a few minutes waiting for the loading time. For some reason, it couldn’t load the next page in the end. So this is the final screen I experience so far.

How to improve the user experience for a SaaS web app

A story about how to make sure the design meets the business objects

Project Background

When I was at Scanlife, I was the solo UX/UI designer. My first task was to redesign their SaaS product, a web application. Although this web app generated the most revenue for the company, there was a concern that it was not user friendly, and therefore diminishing potential returns. Thus, the user experience was seen as very important for growing revenue. My goal was to deliver a more user-friendly experience and to design a more elegant interface.

Identify the problems

After I conducted usability testing, I provided advices about how to improve the learnability, memorability and satisfaction for users. At the same time, I was always enjoying making sure that my design concept met the business need. So I gathered information with different stakeholders and asked questions like “Why we want to redesign this?” “Which features do you wish to optimize?” and “Which user actions would you like to encourage most?” etc. These questions helped me to understand the bushiness goals and what’s the real problem I need to solve.

I believe the quality of the look and feel of a product is an important indicator of the credibility. As you can see from the screenshot below, the look and feel of the old UI was not friendly and modern. The home page was very confusing. Users were unlikely to know where to start. On the other hand, the web app didn’t have the navigation to info users where they stand and what’s the next step. When users wanted to create a code, it took to many steps to complete this task. Each steps was not clear and organized.

Persuade stakeholders and solve conflicts

This application was a tool mainly for the marketers (targeted users). Thus, the functionality had the most priority. However, there was a conflict about which feature had the most priority, “Create a code” or “Manage codes”. The team couldn’t make a decision about which feature should be presented to the users in the first place. To solve that conflict, I built two-user journey based on analyzing the type of users and scenarios. As a result, I differentiated the experience for new users and power users. For the new users, their prioritized task was to create a code. In this case, they will see the “create a code” feature after login to the app. For the power users, they will see the “manage codes” features after login to the app.

After choosing a model for the most common visitor, the typical user path was much clearer. By reducing the steps necessary to create a code action, the experience was simplified. To reduce and simplify the steps of creating a code as much as possible, a pop-up box was designed to connect the actions of create, download, and style a code.

In the future version, I envisioned additional engaging user features involved in this platform, such as “Explore” and “ Case study”. Following the design theory of Donald Norman: “Pleasurable engagement” fun and friendly elements embedded in the design will form a high quality product.

Achievements

I started this project on June 3rd with zero guidance. I feel excited there were so much design work to be done and I wanted to deliver a better product under a tight timeline at the same time. Within one month and a half, I successfully helped the team launched the new UI on July 14th. Everyone seems pleased by the new UI. Being an agile designer in a highly collaborative team means fast iteration. If someone asked me to see my heavy annotated wireframes, I didn’t have those anyway. I believe those are not agile. The magic was in communication and willing to collected and validated their feedback and iterated quickly. During the process of design, I led the design and helped the team started a more effective communication way for design collaboration.

I feel it is necessary to tell my story so people can understand design can really improve the product. Good design is a certainly indicator of product’s credibility.

How to shape the user experience for an existing web app was originally published in Interactive Mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.