Have you ever tried to quantify design? It’s hard. We don’t time it, score it, or even quantify our judging of it. We don’t sell it on the free market by the dozen, meter, or pound. Throughout my career, clients and designers alike treat design as a spectator sport; something artistic to be judged based on random personal taste . (Some hold contests, but that’s even more misguided.) And that’s the argument that feeds the egos of designers and clients alike in how design decisions are made.
Google on the other hand spends a radically large amount of lot of time, resources, and energy on quantifying everything, including design. They famously tested 41 shades of blue in determining their hyperlink color. They view the world as a pile of data to be analyzed. Google’s view of the design process is empirical and akin to most MBA decision-tree curriculum. Both methods, subjective taste and analytical, on their own are incomplete. To paraphrase Jim Collins, the tyranny of the or limits each of these design approaches.
The case against intuitive decision making is that it’s a prediction based on assumptions and people are notoriously bad predicting events beyond their contral. (Just ask any odds-maker, our egos seem hard-wired to believe otherwise.)
On the other hand, purely analytic decisions are void of empathy that affects how people feel and respond toward things. Also, analytics is a reactive task, it’s hard to have effective insights without enough data to benchmark and test. Google’s 41 color study had the luxury of billions of transition to measure, compare, and analyze.
The key to successful effective designing is to combine the two – ala Jim Collins’ genius of the and – in the right order. A good UX designer can anticipate user needs and create a more enjoyable experience, but must rely on analytics to find out for certain and fully realize your goal.
The only way to predict the future is to invent it. That takes courage, and a tuned sense of what people will want without asking them. To ensure your goals, it also takes the discipline to leverage the readily available data to measure the results of your design choices. Only when you combine the intuition and measurable outcomes can you predictably achieve your goals.
Measuring design may be difficult, but the results from our design choices are easy, if you know how to make better design decisions.