Creating a stunning experience for the customers using your product starts with building a user-friendly interface. For any digital product nowadays, that user-friendly design is critical for delivering an engaging experience that keeps customers coming back for more.
However, to design the best experience, you can’t afford to rely on hunches or your intuition. Instead, products need to be built using data and research so that you can identify exactly what your customers want and give it to them. That’s where data driven design comes into play. This article will dive into the world of data driven design and explain why it can make all the difference to how you build your experiences.
What Is Data Driven Design?
Data driven design is a type of design that is supported by data and research. For product and design teams, it is used to gain a better understanding of the audience so that you can prove you are on the right track or make adjustments if you aren’t so that ultimately you can improve your design efforts.
Data driven design is crucial to discovering user pain points, understanding their behavior, and how they interact with digital products. It offers designers the first source of feedback on their MVPs and plays a critical role in successful product conversions and customer experience.
Types of Data
So what types of data are essential for effective design? Fundamentally there are two types of data: quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative Data
What most people think about when they hear the word data is known as quantitative data. This refers to numerical data that can be counted or measured and answers questions related to what, how many and how much.
For example, what actions do your users take when using your product and how many take that action? Some of the most common methods for collecting quantitative data include A/B and multivariate testing, analytics, heatmaps, and large-sample surveys.
Qualitative Data
The other type of data that is just as important for data-driven design is known as qualitative data. Qualitative data is descriptive and usually expressed through words or visuals, such as user personas or customer journey maps. Qualitative data answers questions surrounding why users take specific actions when interacting with a product. For example, why a particular piece of content draws so much user attention. Some ways to gather qualitative data include usability studies, focus groups, analyzing feedback on social media, and conducting customer interviews.
Both qualitative and quantitative data are critical for data driven design. While they serve different purposes, they are equally crucial to building a successful product and customer experience.
Why Use Data Driven Design
Using data to influence your decision-making can be tremendously beneficial for your product and business objectives. Here are a few reasons why you should use data driven design.
Tailor the User Experience
One of the primary benefits of data driven design is that it helps you to understand what your users want from your product so that you can tailor the experience to fit their needs. You can uncover the pain points that inspired your users to search for a specific product and highlight the solution in a meaningful way.
Increase Conversions With a Better Design
Data driven design is helpful in uncovering what does and doesn’t work in product design, enabling you to make changes to your design that increase conversions. Designers can make changes that make a popular product easier to find, hide poorly converted products or highlight critical information a user might be interested in.
Validate Design Concepts With Evidence
Most UX designers try to follow best practices and pair them with their intuition and experience. However, when it comes to designing the best product or user experience, those shouldn’t be the only components. Data driven designs arms you with the evidence to back up your claims and validate whether or not a particular idea or concept is warranted for your target audience.
What Happens If You Avoid the Data
Despite the benefits of data driven design, some might be tempted to avoid using data when designing the user interface and experience. Unfortunately, there are a couple of reasons why avoiding data while designing is a bad idea:
Potentially Ineffective Design Choices
The ultimate danger of not using data driven design is poor design choices. While your gut or even traditional best practices might tell you that positioning a button or CTA where you’ve always done it might be a good idea if it turns out that the data from your users don’t back up that choice, then not making a change could be detrimental. Without data-driven design, what you create might not be in the user’s best interest, which may end up resulting in lost opportunities and revenue.
Wasted Resources
Creating a design takes time and money. When design decisions are made without being backed by data, you risk wasting resources that could be better allocated elsewhere. Also, if an initial design is ineffective, you’ll need to spend additional resources fixing it and potentially derail the entire project.
How Content Bloom Executes UI/UX Design
Leveraging data driven design enables you to better tailor the user experience by gaining a better understanding of your customers. With the right data, you can validate design concepts and increase conversions without running the risk of wasted resources.
Content Bloom’s expertise in user experience design can help ensure every stage of your brand’s UI/UX journey is finely tuned so that your customer receives a product customized to their exact needs. With the help of industry-leading technologies and research-backed decisions, we can help you create excellent user experiences across any channel.
When a multinational corporation needed UI/UX support, they turned to Content Bloom for help, and we assisted them in rolling out updated branding across multiple brand-related websites. Following consultations with the client, we facilitated user workshops and delivered high-fidelity designs that met their requirements.
The client component library was managed using Adobe XD and Content Bloom also provides UX/UI mentorship and design feedback internally and externally to ensure best practices are being implemented.
Ready to improve conversions and create a better customer experience? It’s time to use data to deliver the memorable experiences your customers deserve.
