Metrics and design effectiveness

From the very beginning of my career, I wanted to design not mock-ups, but completed projects with realization. I got into production and sought to work with printers and developers. Thus, I closed the brief and concept part with clients, design and helped with realization. But I did not get into the business part, the criterion for the success of the project was the client's approval (and that I personally liked it). I evaluated the effectiveness only expertly.

The result was a strange situation: I got the money, the client got the result. Neither I nor the client often know how rational and justified it all was. On emotions — yes, cool, everyone is good, but economically? I didn't care much about these questions, but curiously, the client seemed to care about them too. It was on a gut feeling too - "we got good feedback on the design" or "our customers like it". But you can't build an analysis on that, you can't draw conclusions.

In 2016, I went to the Yandex Subbotnik for designers (and it was great, one of the best events!), and there product savvy colleagues were already asking the right question — how correct it is for a designer to expertly evaluate work. After all, you can do research, collect metrics, and draw conclusions based on those metrics. And improve the design further that way. To me, this was the first sign of a new era of data-driven design.

Since then, product companies have been doing exactly that. They research, study, observe, and then set new design and development goals for projects based on their findings. It's already important for designers in product to understand the metrics and how exactly they help the business. In portfolios and resumes, it's important to show the results of your work, not the processes — and that's important! After all, we don't just want to spend time in our lives, we want to get results, I suppose.

But sometimes it's infuriating! Because it turns almost into a cargo-cult. Not to decide for yourself, but to justify everything with studies and numbers. Not to do, but to wait for the results of surveys. Instead of taking responsibility and going forward, the designer is stubborn and says "no, well, here we need to research" Cool alternative to "I'm a designer, I see it this way " )) This sabotages and slows down both the work and the design.

There is a contradiction. On the one hand, to work fast and experiment, you need to have a high degree of freedom and not limit yourself, not always focused only on numbers. On the other hand, if you do not pay attention to efficiency and do not track it is also strange, because our resources are finite, they cannot be squandered without benefit and result.

And to understand this, you have to look at it as two parts of one whole, then there will be no contradiction. Metrics, analytics are tools. And the ability to interpret, deduce hypotheses and set the vector of development of ideas is a person's will and his freedom, including creative freedom. The tool must be used as intended and competently, without denying the human factor - then everything will work out.

At the center of any work is a human being. Everything we do is for people, and we work with people. That is why people dictate what and how things should be, set strategic goals, formulate ideas and concepts, and determine what is valuable in the current cultural and economic environment. At the same time it is necessary to collect data, analyze the results, and adjust the work!

A person sets the goal, the vector of movement, and the project's star. As creative and (non)commercial as they may be. And metrics and data help us understand what is going on and whether we are on the right track. It keeps us accountable and allows us to move forward without shamanism. And now that we have learned to analyze people's behavior and know ourselves better, it would be unwise to give up this benefit. Knowledge gives us the power to influence our lives for the better.

Human→ Metrics → Design