Data driven design - a debate that isn’t going away?

• In: Blog
• By: Maxine
• May 12, 2009

You’ll all remember the mini fracas a month or so back when Doug Bowman pulled up stumps at Google, and moved on to the role of Creative Director at Twitter.

John and I thought there was definitely enough meat on this topic for a thought provoking session at the conference this year, so we were delighted when someone sent us in the direction of local designer Luke Stevens, who will be giving us his insights and hopefully encouraging a bit of debate in his session at Web Directions South this year.

Luke’s just published a thought provoking blog post with some of his thoughts on what happened between Doug and Google. It’s a great taster for what I think will be a really interesting session come October.

With that in mind, I do have one nit to pick with Doug Bowman. He finished his piece on leaving Google by saying “But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”

Web design, in my view, should live or die by the sword of data.

I’ll tell you why: every bit of ‘data’ isn’t an abstract thing. It’s a person like you or me trying to do something, and succeeding or failing.

On the web, you can measure what people do. You can measure what they click, how long they stay for, if they scroll, how many pages they view, if they ‘bounce’, if they return, and so on. You can ask if they were successful or not. For perhaps the first time in history we can accurately measure all interactions with a piece of design.

If it can be measured, it can be improved. And each of those improvements represents helping someone do something a little more successfully.

The full article makes a great piece of lunch time reading.

Your opinion:

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