Column: Data-Informed Design

As a researcher, I want to understand how technology changes people’s lives, not wade through a bunch of data. Like a lot of people, I think in stories rather than numbers; in the tangible rather than the abstract. So, when I made it a goal to understand all of the data about the experiences people have with technology—not just the kinds of data that I was comfortable with—there were some big gaps in my knowledge.

First Steps

First, I had to cross the threshold of my number aversion. This wasn’t too hard because, even though I love to dive into messy questions, I’m not thrilled with messy answers. I’m still relearning statistics—thanks to Khan Academy and The Cartoon Guide to Statistics—getting more confident with Excel, and gaining some basic skills in Tableau. Read More

Recently, I was invited to speak about this topic for the Collision Conference, which is coming up in May: Can good design be measured? This is a great, complicated tangle of a question. Immediately, I started thinking of ways to answer it. If it’s a question I’m supposed to answer it, right?

Can Experience Be Measured?

Answer 1: Yes, because we have to measure it. Teams need to have a way to know whether they’ve achieved their goal. Sure, it’s great to have a happy-customer story or even deep insights from contextual research, but teams also need to know where we’ve been, where we are right now, and where we’re going—and data tells us all of that. Usually, that data needs to tie into what an organization values, whether money earned or lives saved.

Answer 2: Yes, because it helps us to understand people in a different way. A good measure will tell you more than you knew before. It can tell you whether regular visitors to your site are spending more or less time on the site on each subsequent visit. That doesn’t tell you much about the design—and just a bit about the experience as a whole. But measures can also tell you whether people are reading long posts all the way through or which details seem to get the most attention. This may tell you something new and provide a good jumping off point to learning more. Read More

In actuality, most people spend most of their time on Web sites and apps other than those our organizations have created, and we may not know much about what those experiences are really like. However, your organization can map the customer journey. There is no one right way to map a customer journey. Journey mapping can mean defining an ideal path that we’d like customers to take. Sometimes it means seeking a more nuanced understanding of what people do on a Web site. Less often, we look at an experience globally, mapping touch points for a product or brand, both online and offline.

Whether people are making direct comparisons or just moving from site to site, the most common user experience is the multi-site experience. Booking travel typically involves more than ten sites. Finding a place to eat might involve a mix of sites and apps, very few of which are about the actual dining experience. Even watching a favorite TV show—something we used to think of as a fully engaged or directed activity—can involve other sites. Read More