Data-Driven Design: New “Trend” Or An Eternal UX Solution?

Source: dribbble.com

Data and design- these two things are often not used in the same sentence. Why would they be? After all, as far as the traditional definitions are concerned, data is all about logic, information, and cold hard numbers. And the design on the other hand is all about the free expression of human emotions.

These two don’t really go together. Or do they?

Data is permeating every corner of the interwebs right now. So it is not a surprise that we keep hearing the expression data-driven design frequently whenever there is a discussion on UX design. Data is being used to gain insight and that insight is being used to create UI and UX designs that are dominating the market. But is it just another fad? Or is it a practice that will stick? Let’s see.

Is Data the Key to the User’s Heart?

What is the main aim of a designer?

Simply put, the aim of a designer is to develop a UI/UX that fulfills the need of web visitors and drives business growth through user satisfaction. And without the use of data, this process can become a practice of hit and miss.

The analysis of data prior to making design decisions is an important aspect of generating insight. This insight helps designers to find out as much as necessary can about the user’s personal preference, and develop a whole idea on what exactly the user wants from the interface. This part of the UI UX design process is also known as generating a user persona. 

This user persona can tell a lot about the kind of interface the user will be comfortable with based on different variables such as age, gender, profession, etc. it also denotes the useful and not so useful elements the users would value. It will remove the guesswork based on designing experience, past success, and market best practices (which used to be a norm prior to data days). However, before you run off to hire a UI UX design company in NYC or any other major cities, check out the three different types of data-driven processes and what they entail.

Data-driven Design Process: The Three Steps of Awareness

Right now data-driven design thinking is a valuable process for creating successful designs. While most design agencies promise an ‘out-of-the-box’ design solution, mostly what they serve is just basic solutions to problems from the design tradition handbook. And that’s why you need to understand the data-driven framework yourself before falling for any traps.

Source: Designing with Data, by Elizabeth F Churchill; Caitlin Tan; Rochelle King

There are three types of data-driven design thinking. 

• Data-Aware Process

Data awareness is the layer in which the team gives the same amount of importance to both data and other catalysts affecting UX decisions. It means that rather than solely focusing on the data to solve problems, designers are utilizing a wide array of solutions based on the problems and give equal importance to all kinds of decision-making processes of UX design.

• Data-Informed Process

Data-informed is a little malleable approach to data-driven design thinking. This is where designers use additional elements such as qualitative information collected from the UX surveys, their own experience as well as the quantitative data to design effective UX. However; data is still more valuable in this layer of data-driven process.

• Data-driven Process

Being data-driven means one has the exact data necessary to solve a UX problem and making all the resolutions based on that data and nothing else. UX actions such as improving web performance can be considered to be a data-driven task where one can work solely based on the performance-related data collected and nothing else. 

Before choosing any of these methods, you should check which one applies to your UI UX design process. It will be even better if you consult with an expert UI UX design company.  

Collecting The Data: A Manifold Process

Data collection is a wide range of tasks performed to collect all kinds of data that will be useful afterward. And if you are considering a data-driven approach to design then you should be aware of all the ways you can collect data. Also before you hire any web design agency in New York or any major cities check out how they collect data and utilize it in the design process

 Before beginning, you need to know about the two major kinds of data, which are-

• Qualitative Data

Non-numerical in nature, this kind of data deals with what and why’s of the process. This data is observed and recorded and then used in problem-solving methods. 

• Quantitative Data

Quantitative data is data with specific numerical values assigned to it. This type of data usually deals with numbers of users and percentage rates of design success. 

Let’s check out the methods of collecting these two types of data. 

Quantitative Data Collection Methods

This is the type of data that is concerned with the numbers of it all. Following are some ways you can collect quantitative data-

• A/B testing

A/B testing also known as split testing or multivariate testing is a famous method of gathering quantitative data in a data-driven UI design process. It helps in improving the design with the help of data. 

A/B testing usually requires two variants of the interface assigned for testing to two equally sized groups of testers. During the time the test is conducted, the designers observe which interface performs better and make improvements based on that data. More often than not A/B testing results in a significant increase in conversion levels.  

• Surveys

Surveys are an excellent way to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. However, it is crucial to design a UX survey carefully. Without the right queries, the data collected can be useless. Usually, UX UI product design surveys contain two types of questions-

Closed questions: These questions, usually accompanied by a checkbox/radio buttons help in collecting the quantitative data. The answers to these questions do not elaborate on the context or the motivation of the one answering it. Data collected from these questions can be visualized through graphs and charts quite easily.

Open questions: These are the questions that will give the users a chance to discuss a problem, express an individual opinion, and suggest solutions. These discussions can be turned into qualitative data, however, it is harder to analyze and takes a long time.

While designing a survey for the users, ensure the questions are to the point, easy to understand, and most of all, keep the survey anonymous. 

• Analytics

Analytical data can give the designers an overall insight into the performance of the individual pages. Which pages have a higher ‘time-on-page’ average, which pages have higher abandonment rates, analytical data reveals it all. And using this, designers can come up with solutions to rearrange UI UX design content on pages, increase page engagement, and success rate during the redesign process. 

Industry analytics benchmarks is another type of analytical data that helps in understanding whether the website is performing well compared to its rivals in the market and how the redesign efforts are working out.

• Heatmaps

There are many tools that can generate heat maps for the web interface. These heatmaps help to observe which areas of web pages are getting more engagement than usual and which areas need more engagement. This will help to understand the pattern the users are following when checking out the website and assist in reorganizing content. 

Qualitative Data Collection Methods

Qualitative data is all about who, what, and why of it all. The methods of collecting this kind of data are different than those of quantitative data. 

• Competitor/Market Analysis

Competitor or market analysis is one of the top ways of collecting qualitative data. It is a step that is conducted by almost every design and development team. 

By checking out the market one can take note of what the competitors are doing and the results of those actions. It provides an understanding of the kind of practices that are popular among users.

However, make sure that competitor and market analysis does not turn into an absolute imitation of popular sites. This will cause more damage to the reputation of the UX UI product design. 

• Conducting Interviews

Having conversations and discussions with the clients and prospective clients you will get a clear idea of what kind of experience they are looking for. However, this happens to be a costly and time-consuming process. So it might not be possible to conduct a big number of interviews in one go. 

• Following User Journeys And User Flow

The user journey denotes how a user travels through the website. From the main pages to the final destination on the website, from where users finally quit the page or browser, it is considered to be a user journey, and using this data, designers can guide the web visitors through the website. 

For a conversion based website, the business always needs the users to follow a certain user flow. And when the users are not in fact following that pattern, designers will need the data to redesign the user journey on the website.

Wrapping Up: Is Data-driven Design Really the Answer to Digital Success?

Despite all the hype, is it really useful?

As a matter of fact, it is. No matter how many claim design to be an expression of art, it is at the end of the day a business decision to design and alter the elements of a website. So it is not exactly a surprise that data-driven UX design yields a better result than design thinking alone. 

Data brings a comprehensive structure to the design process, making it easier to decide which kind of design policies, design laws, and best practices apply to a certain design. For a modern-day online world, a data-driven strategy for design is going to be the ultimate key to reigning the digital sphere, and that is why most of the major organizations are using data to optimize their products.

Author Bio:

Pratip Biswas is the Founder and CEO of Unified Infotech, a New York-based web design company that has been featured in Deloitte Fast 500 | Fastest growing tech companies in 2018. His company is working with Enterprises, SMB’s and Start-ups to improve their efficiency through Digital Adoption and help them discover new possibilities through constant innovations. Pratip also writes regularly on Blockchain technology and has been published in publications like “Yourstory”, “Dzone” etc.