Top-3 Data-driven ways for exceptional user experience

Think data has no place in serious UX? 

After all, designers have always followed their 'instinct' and 'creative intuition' to birth impactful designs. While there's nothing wrong with this process, the advent of technology has led to an improved data-driven design discipline--one where data and design are one-and-the-same-thing.

Here's a quick run-through of why a data-driven design thinking process is critical for driving a more human-centered design--now more than ever:

• It can help create an optimal user experience and improve business outcomes. In fact, research indicates that “Companies in the top third of their industry in the use of data-driven decision making was, on average, 5% more productive
  and 6% more profitable than their competitors.” 

• It can provide a mix of empirical and intangible user data (aka quantitative and qualitative data) that covers the entire spectrum of the end-users journey with the brand--from the who and the what to the why and the how aspects.

• It acts as a rich repository of user information that can help designers to stop relying on the standard industry best practices, find the correlation between the design and the user, and innovate at scale. 

The writing is on the wall: User experience design is no longer about choosing complimentary colors or creating a 'good-looking' design, it is about understanding the psyche of the end-user and using customer data to drive 'relatable,' 'useful,' and 'personalized' designs that engage and entertain. 

How to Use Data to Create a Human-centered Design? Top-3 Strategies

1. Conduct UX research, create an in-depth user persona, and gather critical user information:

Think of user personas as the blueprint to your design-thinking process. Here's an example of a B2B buyer persona for inspiration that includes all the key elements such as basic demographics, goals, fears and challenges, hobbies and interests, and so on:

Buyer personas are reflective of your ideal customer and are always evolving with time. So make sure to collect data at regular intervals instead of collecting it all at one go. Before you start gathering the data for creating a buyer persona, ask yourself the following questions:

• Why is building the user persona important in the overall design process?

• What kind of tools, channels, and sources should you use to gather accurate information related to your user and build a comprehensive user persona?

Once you've gathered all the information, use the persona to guide your design thinking process in terms of who your ideal user is, what their motivations, requirements, attributes, and behaviors look like, and how design elements can positively influence their interaction with the brand. For instance, designers can integrate the most important product features within a particular design to reel the users in.

2. Use data to integrate empathy and lay the foundation for a human-centric design approach:

"Data science is now an essential skill for every UX team. If you don’t have people who understand how to do data science, you cannot create great designs.”

— Jared Spool

Properly visualized data gives the design a human focus. It empowers designers to leverage empathy as a core design tool and make designing decisions that pave the way for useful and meaningful user experiences.

The best shot at delivering a human-centered design is by leveraging data to solve real-world problems and put the user's needs first, leading to an 'informed' design process. Without understanding your core audience's needs from emotional and rational perspectives, a human-centric design cannot be possible. 

Long story short, there's a greater need to blend the rational truth, which data provides, along with a designer's empathy-led thinking process. This simple-yet-significant strategy can empower brands to deliver an impactful user experience that actually solves the customer's key pain points instead of serving as mere 'eye candy.'

3. Uncover deep insights to redesign the UX:

In cases where the user experience needs to be redesigned (and not designed from scratch), data comes in handy. Brands can use the right mix of data analytics tools to understand:

• What's going wrong within the user experience?
• What's working well for the user experience?
• Are the users engaging with the design?
• What kind of recurring themes, patterns, and opportunities related to user behavior and experience seem to be jumping out from the data collated?

The end goal is to completely immerse yourself in the design research and extract deep insights into the positives and negatives. This collated data can then be used to segment users and target them specifically via different user experiences (if need be). 

Bringing it all together

Let's put the record straight: Data analytics can add value to the design thinking process by:

• Rooting the design in real-time user data, which makes the design more personal and relatable for the end-user
• Helping designers to understand the user from the inside out and use the information to visualize and create a powerful user experience
• Enabling designers to amplify the design by marrying the business goals with the end-user's needs 

In the end, the primary challenge is not finding data in today's data-rich digital environment, it is making sense of the data gathered, followed by informing the design process to add value to the customer's life, one design at a time.

About author:

YUJ Designs

We are a global UX Design Studio delivering valuable experiences for humans that impact businesses. 

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How Design Will Impact Companies in 2022 and Beyond

The pandemic and changes to the nature of work continue to affect every industry, including the design world. The unpredictable business climate is forcing companies to look not only at how they interact with customers, but also with employees, partners, and other stakeholders. Businesses across the spectrum are turning to design to assess the new reality, pinpoint ways to work effectively, and prepare for a still-uncertain future. Based on my work with clients and partners through 2021, here are some thoughts on where the design industry stands in 2022 and what it will look like going forward:

• Organizations that are still trying to pin down an exact ROI for design are wasting time. No one has cracked the code for a simple equation to show what the return is on investing in design, whether that’s design strategy, experience design, or aesthetics. At this point, it’s clear that thoughtful design is a key element to being competitive in today’s world. Most businesses have embraced design as an essential business tool, and they have either integrated a design team into their business processes, or established relationships with design consultants. Any person in company leadership that is still asking for easily quantifiable proof of the value of design is wasting time and losing ground to competitors.

• Developing AI tools requires a human-centered approach that isn’t there right now. Looking at trends for almost any industry you are likely to see predictions that AI will be further integrated in to that industry. However, design and implementation of AI applications are lacking a human-centered approach, and that is hampering success. AI applications designed without considering the people they will impact will be less effective and alienate customers who don’t feel like their needs are a priority.

• Service design will have an impact in industries where it hasn’t been used before. During the pandemic, retail stores and restaurants had to change on a time to try to serve customers in a new way. Restaurants had to rethink their processes from serving customers in the dining room to taking orders online/by phone, cooking and packaging meals, collecting payment and delivering the food with minimal contact. As these industries move forward, service design can help them figure out what the future of serving their customers looks like. What systems and processes from the pandemic should stay, what pre-pandemic processes will return, and what kind of new hybrid systems should be put in place? Service design can help industries that traditionally haven’t used it to plan for a future where they can efficiently serve customers.

• Companies need to radically re-think how they engage the human beings who deliver goods/services to their customers. The job market is mobile and volatile, and companies are scrambling to find good people and to keep them. How do you solve for both the changing nature of employment and employee experience? Beyond making things better through increased pay and benefits, companies must rethink the role of employees and support them in new and different ways. Employees aren’t just extensions of a company’s brand anymore. They are players in the business ecosystem. 

• Digital therapeutics will continue to be a hot trend, and could spur interesting partnerships. Right now, it is mostly pharma companies that are investing in digital therapeutics and navigating the complicated process required to create, test and get approval for this kind of solution. Successful digital therapeutics must be designed by people who both know how to create clinical-level solutions and also know how to design good digital experiences for humans. This could lead to interesting partnerships within the healthcare, design, and tech industries to deliver solutions that can pass regulatory muster and will also be embraced by patients because they are effective and easy to use.

• Companies are integrating behavior science in their business, but not all of them are doing it right. Companies are recognizing the value of behavior science in designing and developing products and solutions, and many companies are bringing in people with expertise in behavior change. Some companies will hire a couple of behavioral scientists or create a behavior change group that works in its own silo. That’s not likely to be effective. The companies that integrate behavioral science across all parts of the Organization are the ones that will reap the greatest benefits. Behavior change thinking needs to be integrated across teams and processes to truly have an impact.

 

Design is having an effect on nearly every industry, in one way or another, and the role of design in business will continue to expand in 2022. Service design, user experience, behavior change, employee experience, and many other kinds of design will play a role in success and continue to influence how companies connect with stakeholders moving forward. 

About author

Jennifer Briselli

Chief Design Strategy Officer, Mad*Pow

Jen's a lifelong learner with an insatiable curiosity and deep passion for science, education, and empowering people through design. Her design philosophy is less about solving people's problems for them, and more about building the tools, environments, and circumstances that enable people to improve their own lives. At Mad*Pow, she does just that, leading the delivery practices as the Chief Design Strategy Officer.

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