Analytic vs. Holistic Thinking Battle When Designing Products
Traditionally, holistic thinking and analytical think may differ in how they perceive an object in its environment. Well, as a product person, my day job as a product designer, my stakeholders would describe my strengths as being able to think analytically, breaking down complex problems in a logical way, and also describe me as a holistic thinker which means I often zoom out and start with mapping out the big picture and end up with creating a journey map, or users landscape, etc.
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.
