Session Spotlight

Data Driven UX Decisions

There's always a new UX feature that needs to be implemented. And as a Developer, do we just sit there and say yes to everything and anything that comes to us, or should we analyze the requirements and make sure we're creating an optimized implementation? Qualitative and Quantitative research are great ways to find out if you're going to implement something that is going to make an impact to your customers, or if you should reconsider the direction. It's always easier to pivot before going into development because there are so many variables. Development time is much more costly. There could be regressions, dependencies that are required, and more. Being able to reconsider the user experience to ensure the feature you are implementing will provide value, this could very well save your team time and effort in the end. Qualitative data is subjective and cannot be measured objectively. However, qualitative data offers perspective and a richer insight into why behind user behavior. Data collection sources includes user interviews, focus groups, surveys and more. Quantitative data is objective data that can be measured through concrete numbers or values. However, the meaning behind this data is open to interpretation. Data collection sources includes analytics, heat maps, a/b testing, and more. Being able to receive direct user feedback is vital. Selecting a targeted audience to have useful data is important to this process. Not just choose any random people, but choosing a diverse set of users who use your services and products well ensure the accuracy of your User Research. The data you collect from these studies will help you make more sound decisions when implementing new features. It's one to build something you feel will work vs something you know will work based on user data. Even having this targeted data, sometimes it's not always accurate. Using A/B for the user driven feature would solidify the decision your team has made. Every thing we build, comes with time, effort, and lots of decisions. Our time is precious and anything that takes time to implement, we want to ensure it's not gone to waste. People should attend this session because there are many teams out there building features that are not driven by user research metrics. Knowing that you should be involved early in the planning stage, asking questions about implementation. Trusting that the time it will take you to implement this feature won't just waste your time, but will be valuable to the consumers that will use this new feature.