Mobilising data

Textile 2023 week 50

There are many ways to measure how well your product is doing. You can do what I do and go talk to people using them and you can do what is a lot easier and automatic which is use data to find out. Yet, this is one thing that designers often overlook or don’t think about, as it is often the perceived job of the Business Analyst (BA) or Project Manager (PM) to sort out. But our job, especially for me in a place that works with data and making it safe, is to look at how we can mobilise our design to understand that data. This typically means that part of designing the screens, views and interactions is also pointing out which of those we can gather data on and how well we can do this. Does the button that I think should go there at the top not only help the user get to where they’re going quicker, but also be part of a larger way to see how they complete the entire sequence of building a project quicker? What can we track and gather enough whilst respecting privacy to understand user interactions in the aggregate? In some ways this is a bit of a paradox for an encryption focused company, but yet another good problem to have when thinking about data and how to treat it.