Sportsbet UCD Principle: Listen to the Data
As designers we make a lot of guesses. These are highly educated guesses. These are educated by our experience, best practice and personal opinion. This is really important as it enables us to quickly work our way through the bad ideas to the good ones. However, we shouldn’t be limiting our selves by our own historical knowledge.
There are many sources of data about our customers which help us understand their needs, issues and wants during the initial design process. Some of this is easy to get access to and some is harder, but we should always investigate what we can get hold of in our time frames. This could be survey data, customer service data, usage or account data. Historical qualitative data can also give useful insights, as it is likely that we have spoken to the target customer group in the past.
The phrase ‘lie, damn lies and statistics’ has never been as true as it is now in the world of data. Asking the right questions of the data is vital. Statistical Significance is not an art with large data sets. It is important that as designers we have a good base understanding of statistics so that we can understand what it is telling us. It is also important to avoid the temptation to ask bias questions of the data to skew it to your point of view.
The design process does not stop once something has shipped. It is important to listen to the data of when it is in the customers hands. This data can be MVT data, analytics, post release surveys or customer service data. If this data is saying something unexpected, it is important to find out why and follow up. It is also important that when this live data is telling that what you created was awesome, celebrate!!!
