Measuring and learning

Textile 2024 week 05

For the past week or so I’ve begun digging into measuring design. This isn’t something that a designer typically thinks of. Sure, we talk about evidence a lot, and we assume something is being measure and the right person is going to tell us when something isn’t quite working out as planned or as assumed when it was designed and built, but sometimes part of design is figuring out how to measure yourself. This figuring out evidence gathering though should be considered part and parcel of the design process, just as much as doing user research and interviewing and whatever other plethora of exercise we can do in person with people. But figuring out how to measure how your work is being used, in real life, and without someone there observing them is something different. One interesting thing about this is when you learn about things like Real Experience Score (RES) and how to use performance and infer perceptibility and usability through site measuring it gets you thinking, as it should. And this should get a designer thinking of how the thing actually loads, what they see, how quickly and how little of it changes, and how we can tweak designs in appreciation of that.