Over the last 15 years I’ve noticed a montage in design from art to science. During this time, I witnessed many hurdles and obstacles we’ve all come to share and swap stories upon. One in particular is the difference between attitudinal and behavioral data. Where attitudinal is subjective feedback, and behavioral data is observed fact, we come to find on our teams the yearning for others that confirm our own opinion in attitude. Perhaps we’ve heard this term described to us as bias. Confirmation bias. Where we drive design decisions based on agenda rather than data. Agenda-Driven vs Data-Driven.

With the rise of Big Data over the last decade, we’ve come to understand the NSA was collecting all of our data without our knowing. Thanks Edward. Well, it wasn’t just our own tax dollars funding the collapse of privacy. It was also corporations that acquired our data with their freemium products, and our ignorance is bliss, our data was sold to other businesses in a B2B transaction known as the advertisement industry. Was this dark UX?

I myself have succumbed to this impulse of taking advantage of the consumerism culture in western civilization. Working alongside marketing departments, I too have yearned for what’s known as “vanity metrics.” Short-term marketing gain, to pat ourselves on our backs. Thinking we did a good deed for the business and we’ll soon be promoted for it. Doing things like a pop up that asks users to sign up for email newsletter for a discount code, and then to turn around and register them for an account they may or may not have wanted merely by asking for a password creation on the subsequent screen. This little trick sure increased account registrants but in no way increased the quality of our community. Although we boosted short term gain, we lost long term brand credibility and trust.

Today, our society is wising up to the fact that we’ve been selling their data behind their backs. In some countries, like the UK, companies have to pay dividends to consumers for using their data. In the United States, we’re controlled primarily by big donors to politicians. In a Princeton/ Harvard study, it showed that politicians in congress have favored their donors needs over their constituents over that last 3 decades. Only recently, did AOC and Bernie Sanders, break the mold by crowdfunding. Isn’t that what taxes are? Crowdfunding?

“Choosing a target persona is a political choice.” — Erika Hall

Currently, I’m a mentor of user experience design at Springboard an online bootcamp. Some scoff and complain that bootcamps just ship portfolio case studies with fake projects in them. Yet, my mentees and I have a different approach. I treat them as professionals from the start rather than “wet behind the ears students.” This framing positions them as entrepreneur design researchers conducting research in industries about business and human problems. When framing in this way, the students seed money of $10K goes into their research grant for 12 months, and they come out with 4 scientific journal publications as case studies in their blog. This renders them as thought leaders in their chosen industries rather than mere students with fake projects. If there’s real people involved in the research, that’s anthropology and psychology. It’s not fake it’s real science.

One of the most forgotten parts of the qualitative research process is the stakeholder interview and the subsequent analysis. You see, although we may conduct them, we too often forget to report the analysis thereafter. Leaving everyone on our team to scratch their head and ask “what was the value in that research theatre?” Research is often seen as an extra cost rather than cost savings investment that it is. This is true when the research is not done correctly.

To be continued…