Plato’s cave allegory, silo-thinking and experience design.
What does Plato’s cave allegory have in common with human centered design?
It shows the effects of narrow thinking – a phenomenon we can still observe in many organizations — where it sometimes seems that one department doesn’t talk to other departments to get a holistic, cohesive understanding of the customer’s experience and their problems.
„That is someone else’s responsibility“ is often a standard jargon in such organizations. But: in the customers mental models — meaning how your customers think how things might work — there is only one responsibility, not several (based on how internal organizational things might work)
That means: customers do not split up responsibilities in department-like silo thinking, like the organization itself probably does.
So, getting rid of this department-like thinking and instead gaining a holistic understanding of customers is key to get an idea of the ways how your customers think, and then put this learnings of your customer’s way of thinking first — not the mapping of the underlying internal business structures (or even the technical backend structure) and hierarchies to the users’ interface. Everything else will most likely lead to silo-thinking and self-referential design which will have negative effects on the customer’s experience.
