tested numerical stats or click traffic or some scientific formula. However, Luke Wroblewski highlights other kinds of metrics—qualitative and quantitative—such as market share, audience growth, customer satisfaction, and smart estimates [ 5]. Plus, with ethnography, affective research, and story-based methods, it’s clear that the boundaries of what constitutes data are broadening.
Indeed, just as valuable, if not more so, is the data of our experience: the empirical, observational, and anecdotal types arising from watching and listening to people in their actual context, which adds richness in terms of the nuances of goals and subtleties of problems, beyond what Web analytics can provide. Debra Dunn, of Stanford’s Institute of Design, says that adhering to Web analytics “makes it very difficult to take bold leaps; it is more from engaging with users, watching what they do, understanding their pain points, that you get big leaps in design” [ 4].
Another type of data that shapes design decisions is the designer’s own evolved sense of judgment, perception, and informed intuition, after several years of working with clients/ projects across diverse contexts. For such seasoned designers, this is a vital kind of data from actual field experience in leveraging past mistakes, lessons learned, patterns identified, and drawing upon that reservoir accordingly.
Digging deeper, however, we see that underlying this bias toward usability lab-gathered data is an assumption of proving isolated pieces of design
solutions as scientific truth, absolute and final. This contrasts sharply with approaching design as a holistic demonstration of an idea for iteration and evolution in cyclical fashion. There needs to be greater appreciation of the fact that data is not truth, but is merely one point in the deliberation over what is appropriate for a context, shaped by healthy skepticism. A productive approach requires a liberal interpretation of data, recognizing multiple flavors as valid and legitimate, for different phases of a project.
having influenced not just architects and urban planners but also software engineers and interface designers. More recently, Jenifer Tidwell’s book Designing Interfaces provides an excellent compendium of visual and behavioral patterns covering the past 20 years of GUI-based computing with well-stated reasoning and examples. Erin Malone has recently documented patterns for social applications in Designing Social Interfaces, and was instrumental in establishing the popular Yahoo Pattern Library, which has been a great boon for Web designers and developers alike. These patterns were robustly tested and demonstrated with live code for share and reuse. Other companies like Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP create and maintain design pattern libraries for internal use, as well.
2. Principles. Donald Norman’s infamous The Psychology of Everyday Things (POET) has long been a guidebook on effective human factors, as is Mullet and Sano’s Designing Visual Interfaces for visual design principles drawn from graphic design—harmony, balance, grids, typography, and color. Tufte’s series of elegant books is another revered source of visual examples. Design is not mere black magic—it is certifiable in the evidence of one’s own experience, and it is based upon logical reasoning from geometry and optics. Cultivating an internal sensitivity of how to apply and bend such principles in practice is the mark of a great designer; such texts provide that basis. Indeed, even usability guru Jakob Nielsen admitted
[ 3] Spool, J. Interaction’09 Conference, held February 2009 in Vancouver.
When surveying the outputs of designers amid the maelstrom of a messy, iterative process, outsiders may typically presume that designers just make up stuff through some mystical channeling of their ego or riffing on the style of the day. Design may be a messy activity, but messy does not mean mystical. User-centered design methods provide rational coherence and legitimacy, yet any veteran designer knows that walking through the canonical steps of UCD will yield only marginally improved mediocrity, rather than novel, imaginative breakthroughs. Sometimes you have to make lateral leaps or skip steps. So how does a skilled designer know that what she’s doing will result in something compelling yet appropriate?
There are several bases of design knowledge:
1. Patterns. Christopher Alexander established the notion of design patterns with his book A Pattern Language,
[ 4] Helft, M. “Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google.” New York Times, May 9, 2009, Business section.
[ 5] Luke Wroblewski’s Functioning Form, http://www.lukew. com/ff, “On Data and Design” post, May 11, 2009.
November + December 2009
References:
Archives