Designing with Data: Improving the User Experience with A/B Testing

by Rochelle King

“the difference [...] in my mind, is that you weigh the data as one piece of a messy problem you’re solving with thousands of constantly changing variables. While data is concrete, it is often systematically biased. It’s also not the right tool, because not everything is an optimization problem. And delegating your decision making to only what you can measure right now often de-prioritizes more important macro aspects of the

Importante para lembrar

What this means is that designing the user experience should also involve sketching out what data you will need that will help you understand your designs. Design the data capture, analysis, and questions as part of your design process.

Design is not art. Design does not exist for design’s sake. Design is about problem solving. There is a little bit of backlash sometimes among designers toward metrics and data. Maybe they feel like it’s taking some of their creativity away or they don’t want to be a slave to the numbers, that sort of thing. I think designers have a responsibility to know whether or not they’ve actually solved a problem.