Is Design Metrically Opposed?

Jared Spool, founder of UIE, gave this talk at the Design and Content Conference in 2015. The world of metrics and analytics has always been at odds with how designers work. Design is a process of finely tuning our gut intuition to create a great user experience, yet sometimes the measures we take point to a different outcome. Which do we believe: our gut, or what the computers are collecting?

Spool explores measures, metrics and KPIs. He shares the techniques behind Amazon’s and Netflix’s success, and shows how practices like the growth hacking approach to increasing monthly active users have hurt the online experience of Instagram and LinkedIn. He also presents alternatives to satisfaction and net promoter score that give insight into the design process and help designers tune their intuition.

The talk’s learning questions ask what easily collected analytics like bounce rate and time-on-page really tell us about user experience, how to construct true KPIs that predict future user behaviour, and why advanced techniques such as a money-left-on-the-table analysis and the CE11 show how powerful metrics can be in design.