Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Article Idea:

Data Driven Design

suggested by David Shen on 2009/04/01

There were a number of posts and stories across the net about how Google’s data driven design is not how design should be done, and that it’s data driven environment is unfriendly to designers. I’d love to see more on this topic. While I totally believe in the use of intuition to guide design, I also cannot just discount the fact that you can prove through testing data whether or not your intuition is correct. I believe that with the internet, we have for the first time in design history the means to test and retest designs for actual effectiveness against users on a variety of metrics: usefulness, attractiveness, monetization, etc. AND make changes based on the data in a timely fashion. I’d love to hear more on this topic from Google or other places where people have put designs to the test through marketplace testing and looking at the resulting data.