Presented by Sarah Parmenter.
- What we don’t have is designers who can explain their design.
Instincts are experiments. Data is proof.
- We’re now developers of systems.
- We can’t rely on designs living on their “wow” factor.
- When you’re able to bring data to the argument, your points are much easier to back up and meet with less resistance.
- “Data” (incorrectly) implies numbers, so “research” may be a better word for it.
- Tim Brown’s Change By Design
Get everyone on the same page, not thinking through preference. – Samantha Warren
- MailChimp uses Evernote Business to get things done.
Nobody has an excuse to make an uninformed decision anymore.
- Airbnb sends professional photographers out to photograph owern’s homes to improve the quality of listings.
[With data,] designers go from decorators to problem solvers. – Aaron Walter
Tools
Vanity Metrics
Beware Vanity Data! Vanity data is a piece of data upon which you cannot act.
Examples of vanity metrics:
- Hits
- Total signups
- Pageviews
- Unique visitors
- Likes
If you can’t act on a metric, it’s a vanity stat.
- Track people and their habits, total number of paying customers, etc. These are the valuable pieces of data.
- Design for people!
Common Threads
- Blushbar: Sarah applied what she’d learned working on the web to opening a styling salon in the UK.
Nothing has taught me more about our industry than doing something outside of it.
- Try and work outside of your comfort zone. You’ll be surprised what you learn.
- Experimenting with Facebook campaigns and seeing how quickly business pickups.
- Three months from initial idea to opening the front doors.
- How do you establish personas when you have no data? Intuition!
- Using True SocialMetrics to keep tabs on social media traction, etc.
Facebook posts get half their reach within 30 minutes of being posted.
- Timing is everything on Facebook.
We need to appear to remember way more than we actually do.
- Crazy Egg can create heatmaps for where on your page users are clicking.
- Optimizely for user A/B testing.
- Overlay numbers on a wireframe to indicate content hierarchy which will inform reordering in a responsive design.