Data Insight for UX (2022)

The goal of using data in the design process is to inform our design solutions with the strength of data. When data and design work in harmony, design is empowered by data and best data practices become the back-bone of elegant design solutions. With user experience and with data, insight is generated to understand our users, define the appropriate metrics, and understand the value of elevating the user experience.

The core of data and design is to deepen our understanding of people. Users can be segmented into any number of categories: where they live, how old they are, or the device that they use, for example. With strong data practice, we begin to understand the nuances of our users that utilise our products, the similarities, the differences, and gain extremely rich insight to how we can make our user experiences more significant, and more meaningful for the beautiful and diverse users that use our products.

At the heart of user experience design is problem solving for users. Defining by what standards do we define success, and what metrics are appropriate to reflect the impacts of our design solutions. Experimental design requires equal amounts of empathy as do each other part of best design practices. What is the most right question, most free of bias, what parts of the activity logs are the most useful to understand our users, and what is valuable to them. How can we increase the retention rates of people that use the product by understanding what parts of the product are most significant to people that engage with our products most frequently? These are the beginnings of investigations that will provide amazingly rich insight about our users, and how we can best serve them with elegant design solutions.

The value of design historically has been been difficult to back and without identified key metrics. The role of data in the design process is to “defend your design decisions and root them in the needs of your users and your business” (King). When our questions are relevant, our data appropriate, and our data reliable — we can understand and serve our users more deeply, creating more significant experiences around our product, and how we can create sustainable design solutions that facilitate growth in our users as much as in our companies, on steadfast back-bone of data-driven design practices.

Data and design are not opponents, like a creative to the logician, but instead complementary partners in user experience. Who our users are, how can we best serve them, and how to leverage values to create better, more strong, and more elegant design solutions to empower our products. Data, as much as design, is equally as important to bring truly elegant design solutions to life.

Sources

King, R., Churchill, E., and Tan, C. Designing with Data. O’Reilly Media, 2017. Quoted is Jon Wiley, Director of Immersive Design at Google

Chen, Andrew. “Know the Difference between Data-Informed and versus Data-Driven.” Andrew Chen, 2017, andrewchen.com/know-the-difference-between-data-informed-and-versus-data-driven/. Andrew Chen led rider growth at Uber and is now a partner at a venture capital firm in the Bay Area.

Mosseri, Adam. “Data Informed, Not Data Driven” at Adaptive Path, UX Week 2010, 2010. Adam is the design director of Facebook (2010).