Cennydd Bowles writes about data-led design vs. idea-led design in Ideas and/or data:
Product design that’s driven entirely by data is horrible. It leads us down a familiar path: the 41 shades of blue, the death by 1000 cuts, the button whose only purpose is to make a metric arc upward. It’s soul-destroying for a designer. But its moderate counterpart, data-informed product design, is fine. It reduces risk, and encourages confidence and accountability.
Product design driven entirely by ideas is equally painful. The romantic notion of design genius and the Big Idea soon gets swamped by a culture of risk, favouritism, and blame. Idea-informed product design is fine. It provides agility, creativity, the power to see blindspots and seize opportunities.
Braden Kowitz makes a similar call for a middle-of-the-road approach in Should Tech Designers Go With Their Guts — Or the Data? For an extremely practical view of using data in design, check out Joshua Porter’s excellent talk from SXSW 2011 called Metrics Driven Design. And while we’re at it, here are a couple more recent posts about using data in the design process: