Design: Data-Informed Design

Envision coffee machines that start brewing just when you think it’s a good time for an espresso, office lights that dim when it’s sunny and workers don’t need them, your favorite music app playing a magical tune depending on your mood, or your car suggesting an alternative route when you hit a traffic jam.

Predictability is the essence of a sustainable business model. In a digital world, with millions of users across the globe, prediction definitely has the power to drive the future of interaction. Feeding a historical dataset into a system that uses machine-learning algorithms to predict outcomes makes prediction possible. Read More

When we think of analytics, we think of marketing campaigns and funnel optimization. Analytics can seem a little overwhelming, with so many charts and lots of new features. How can we use analytics for design insights?

The best thing about analytics is that they can show us what people do on their own. The worst thing is that analytics don’t tell us much about context, motivations, and intent. Like any kind of data, there are limitations. But that doesn’t mean analytics aren’t useful. Working with analytics is about knowing where to look and learning which questions you can reasonably ask. Read More

A customer experience (CX) design strategy comprises intentional design activities and processes that, when taken together, enable a team to deliver exceptional customer experiences. When you create meaningful products or services, they offer unique value to customers and are distinguishable from those of competitors.

I lead a Customer Experience Design team in the Digital Marketing and eCommerce group at the one of the world’s largest Web-conferencing companies. Over the last few years, my team has undertaken several complete overhauls of the Web site and designed the customer experience for a new content-management platform. Upper management dictated extremely aggressive deadlines, and we launched on schedule.

One thing that initially seemed to surprise everyone in the company—except our team—was that our in-house CXD team was responsible for executing such ambitious research and design projects in their entirety rather than using agencies. Read More