How to be data-driven as a designer

Being data-driven adds gravitas to your work. It’s a way for you, as a designer, to pinpoint problems and also track if your solutions are working. From click-through data to feedback from users via the sales team, using as much data as possible helps to ensure you are building the right solutions for your users.

Use data to identify opportunities 

One of my favourite ways to use data is to identify future opportunities. Below are some techniques I use to identify opportunities:

• Going through previous research to see if there any repetitive themes that have come up

• Speaking to other teams that interact with customers eg. the insight team, data team, sales and account managers. These teams also collect data and I may have some insight that may help

• Using analytics tooling to identify possible pain points

The great thing about this is that you can use these techniques in combination with each other to create a stronger case or individually. The initial data should give you an indication of potential opportunities, it helps you to narrow down and prioritise opportunities. By having some initial data behind an opportunity it helps to focus your research and dig deeper into understanding the problem. 

Using data when showcasing solutions

Another way to use data in your design process is to use it to get buy in from the team. When going through your design don’t just talk about the design and it’s functionality. Articulate the why the design is how it is and the data from an experiment or feedback from users that informed your design decisions. This shows how your design solution has reasoning behind it and puts aside personal preferences. 

If your solution is focused on meeting a OKR (objectives and key results), or business goal then make sure you articulate how your solution will do that. 

When showcasing to stakeholders start with the goal of the solution, the metrics you are aiming to move and the data that lead you to identifying the opportunity. Once you have given the context the next is to go through your process and articulate how you got to the solution ensuring that you ensuring that you mention the data that has informed your final solution. 

Use data to validate a solution 

Before working on a solution with my team. We would start with how would we know this has been successful? We would identify a metric to track as an indicator of success. This meant that, from the beginning, my team and I were thinking about data and metrics. It meant that we were laser-focused on achieving our goal as quickly and as lean as possible. Before releasing we would then ensure we had monitoring in place to observe how well the feature is doing. 

Closely monitoring meant that we could pivot quickly and iterate or investigate further if it wasn’t working as we hypothesised. 

Using data is another tool in our designer’s toolbox that can really help us in the decision making process and helps the team to reduce risk.