Data-driven or evidence based design
Ignoring data - or using data in an ineffective way - can have serious consequences for the success of your website, intranet or web app.
Functionality that looks good on paper can actually be very confusing or impractical in practice. Users experience a threshold and become frustrated or even fail to achieve their goal.
Our ultimate ambition? To match your product, company, idea or service even better to the real needs of the customer or user. Because a satisfied user becomes an ambassador. Always and everywhere.
What is data-driven or evidence based design?
Both terms do not mean the same thing. But in essence, they share the same goal: to make informed decisions.
The importance of data-driven or evidence based design
During the user experience design process, we make decisions over and over again that affect the user experience.
What is data-driven or evidence based design?
Both terms do not mean the same thing. But in essence, they share the same goal: making well-founded decisions. You set up a hypothesis or UX experiment based on your objectives.
Based on the results (data), you are going to disprove that statement, validate it or possibly adjust it for re-testing. When your UX-experiment is fully executed, you can use the conclusion to make a design decision that will give a proven and therefore predictable result (evidence based).
Opinions, conjecture, extrapolation, intuition, the HiPPO effect, bias, guesswork, habits, trends, fallacies, anecdotes and best practices are all the opposite of evidence.
The importance of data-driven or evidence based design
Data-driven or evidence-based design ensures that your user experience design process is underpinned by data and research.
During the user experience design process, we make decisions over and over again that affect the user experience such as:
- The customer journey
- What do you make available in an interface?
- What does the interface look like visually?
- How should something function?
Data-driven or evidence-based design ensures that this process is underpinned by data and research.
You go from making predictions on gut feelings to making changes with a certain and predictable result.
It sounds very simple. And yet most of your competitors ignore this principle. They invest blindly and hope for the best. You would never do that, would you?
How do you proceed?
Data is only useful if the research is carried out according to the rules of the art.
Within a number of disciplines such as communication sciences, psychology and sociology, a great deal of scientific research has already been carried out into human behaviour. Many results from this research can be applied to digital communication and how a user interacts with an interface.
However, this kind of information is not always appropriate for your specific situation. That is why it is important to supplement this expert knowledge with user research. This way, you get feedback from your end user in a 100% relevant context.
However, the data is only useful if the research is carried out according to the rules of the art. Meticulous and methodical. Suggestive questions, incomplete data, poor hypotheses. These are just a few common examples of poorly designed research.