Leveraging a data- informed design approach
Consider for example you visit a doctor to cure a health issue; just by hearing out the symptoms of an issue, the doctor would not prescribe medicines but would want to analyze deeper — so recommends certain detail tests to get to the root cause. Likewise in design to solve a problem statement, working with assumptions does not serve the purpose, but analyzing deeper — about user’s behavior, goals, motivations, and expectations are very essential, this approach should be the crux in user-centric design. An experience that enhances the product to effectively engage and satisfy its users is undoubtedly built on great design research.
“If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.”
— Alan Cooper
The success of a business is measured in terms of how well it is built on a scalable solution and not by just used, recommended, and tried. Products or services which prioritize customer experience are more likely to stand out from their competitors and enjoy greater brand loyalty long term. While building a cohesive product, you don’t need to start with the brightest idea or utilize the best technology, but the key is just the need to start by understanding people. The notion of researching the right audience and the value of understanding the user cannot be ignored;
For Whom?_______ Why?________ How?_______What?______
To arrive at a deeper understanding of these foundation questions and everything revolving around these questions, various meticulous research techniques would help in the in-depth investigation and observations to derive a holistic perspective about the end-users.
Understand organization goal <-> Understand user needs
In order to be aligned with the core business strategy and validate the idea, learn quickly, and move faster with higher success, research should be paramount in the design process, and must be a discipline that is adapted and conducted throughout the process.
While user research informs design, it doesn’t immediately provide solutions to problems. There needs to be an exploration of ideas and design iterations before those solutions are reached. As designers, we need to know the process of coming up with a solution, that is useful.
Design is an iterative process, receiving feedback at different stages helps in rethinking the original solution. The earlier we rely on feedback, the easier it will be to update the design and thrive in achieving a human-centric design strategy. In a rapidly increasing digital world, user perceptions and demands are dynamically shaping, designers need to be able to persuade the user to hook and engage them with the brand.
“The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, empathize, synthesize, and glean insights that enable him or her to ‘make the invisible visible.’
– Hillman Curtis
A well informed insightful research about the real-world provides pivotal data, effectively curating these data to the forefront of every design decision makes the product or service impactful rather than just making intuition decisions, the approach which leverages insightful data in the design process is termed as “Data-Informed-Design” or “Data-Driven Design”.
Pursuing the data-informed design approach
Data is essential to understand the situation, one must understand that the digital design is not just about beautifying; it is more about having an organic and mindful approach, both with respect to business and customer goals.
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.”
– Paul Rand
While designing, we need to understand the actual facts of what drives the reaction from the users, It is essential to follow a build-measure-learn cycle — to identify and fix the most severe problems in the product, gather feedback and iterate accordingly. The data derived from the research drives the decision making and immensely impacts while tailoring the product to the user’s needs. Through testing, iteration, and a consistent feedback loop, you’re constantly uncovering more insights to inform a more valuable product with data-informed design.
It doesn’t matter how well, visually pleasing a product is created, all that only matters is what the user thinks. In order to build user-focused online experiences, use a data-informed approach. “Data-informed design” is a somewhat more flexible and straightforward approach. This is about using information gleaned from both quantitative and qualitative sources to inform how you make design decisions for the targeted user.
The inherent research data sources
User research has two parts, one is about gathering data and the other is synthesizing data, albeit which helps in designing a scalable solution by “connecting the dots”. The trick is having a firm grasp on what you want from data, and asking the right questions of it.
Here are the two approaches to collect and analyze data:
Qualitative data
This is a “textual data” that helps to understand the “why”, it is used to understand the underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations, thoughts or experiences. Basically, it is about understanding your user’s behavior from their perspective and help in formulating a theory or hypothesis. Some common methods include focus groups (group discussions), user interviews, usability testing.
Quantitative data
This is a “numerical data” that helps to understand “what”, it is about facts, measurements, and numbers, that can be transformed into usable statistics. This type of research data provides support when you need to draw general conclusions and can be used to establish generalizable facts about a topic. such as click events for primary actions, time-on-page numbers, conversion rates, page views, and scroll depths. This type of research explores large sample sizes of data to identify trends and patterns. Some methods include surveys, analytics, and A/B testing.
“Users are not always logical, at least not on the surface. To be a great designer you need to look a little deeper into how people think and act.”
- Susan Dray
Qualitative research is almost always the starting point when you seek to discover new problems and opportunities–which will help you do deeper research later. Quantitative data will give you measurements to confirm each problem or opportunity and understand it. It’s important to use a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative methods to come to a holistic understanding of the user and problems to be solved. Both methods are useful for answering different research questions and cannot substitute one for the other, having said that data-driven design thinking isn’t just about gathering as much data as possible. Ideally, you’ll want to develop a plan for collecting data in accordance with the design and business needs.
