Big Data talks

Big data refers to data sets so large and fast-moving that they need special tools to store and analyse. Digital products generate it constantly: every click, search and purchase can be logged, and the patterns in that data are used to personalise experiences, make predictions and guide business decisions.

For UI, UX and product design, big data is both a resource and a risk. It can show how millions of people actually use a product and help teams make informed decisions, but numbers alone rarely explain why people behave as they do, and collecting data raises real questions of privacy and trust.

The talks here, from 2012 to 2019, reflect that tension. Tricia Wang’s The human insights missing from big data and Genevieve Bell’s The Secret Life of Big Data look at what data does and doesn’t reveal, and Maciej Ceglowski’s Haunted by Data addresses its downsides. Margaret Gould Stewart’s TED talk How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too) and Jim Sterne’s Augmenting UX with Data (UX Poland, 2015) connect data to design, while Sebastian Wernicke explains how to use data to make a hit TV show. Maurits Kaptein’s talks on persuasive profiling, Hilary Mason’s Replacing Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script and Andreas Refsgaard’s Playful Machine Learning complete the set, alongside the algorithm sub-topic.