Augmenting UX with Data

Big data has made it cheaper to keep information than to delete it, but what is it worth to the user experience? In this introductory talk from UX Poland 2015, Jim Sterne, who has explained online marketing to audiences and corporations since 1994, reviews what data can be collected and how useful it can be for improving customer response and satisfaction.

He argues that good user research is hard. People often lie in surveys to please the interviewer, and only combining qualitative with quantitative data reveals the truth about users or markets. As he puts it, “All models are wrong, some models are useful.”

Jim also looks at the role of the data analyst. The sea of information isn’t yet bringing value to the people who own it, and the analyst’s job is to interpret it and produce specific insights. He sees a big gap between the analyst and the “insight consumer” who expects clear results, and notes that the best we can do is build approximate models of reality with complex tools. The talk offers a framework for gleaning insights from user data, not just user feedback.