Learning data in design

Textile 2023 week 41 note

Textile is a data tools company and I’m the designer here. Until beginning work here, I’d not thought much about the actual handling of data in general. Whilst always being interested in and aware of how companies might be using our data in general, I’ve not given much thought to how it’s put together on the back end. When you’re someone working on user experiences and interfaces, the focus is almost exclusively in how the data is input, output and seen. Now that I’m designing the tools with which developers and data handlers manage and store what are now typically immense amounts of data, it’s my job to understand some of those underpinnings as much as a designer can, let’s say at a cursory level. So I’ve taken up learning how this works, which means “MySQL for Beginners.” The goal of user experience and interaction design is to understand the user and in this case the user isn’t an “end” user, but the person building the tools for software which that end user would use. This, just as with any other application that I would design for, requires a certain sensitivity to the medium or domain of work, it’s pains and joys as it were, and by digging into it just even a bit so far, I think I’ve come a lot closer to understanding that hopefully. So now, when someone I’m interviewing for user research talks about joining tables, I understand in some ways what they’re talking about, and will be able to design them a better way of doing that.