Data informed User-Centred design. Is it possible?

This has been my primary question for the last six months. It has been so powerful, that made me start blogging again, 2.5 years after leaving behind my relatively short career as a tech blogger. I hope I can find the time and space for this to work, talking about a series of things that I am interested in.

Starting with UCD (User-Centred design), the one and only approach to UX design that can effectively answer to most of everyday problems and Data driven design which seems to many (and might be) as the new, different and most valuable kid on the block.

Mixing tomatoes with oranges

Mixing a quantitative and a qualitative approach may seems like mixing oranges with tomatoes, but the truth can be dramatically different. The ability to succeed in that depends on your understand on UCD, the underlying mechanisms of any system and the quality of your data.

I am more than lucky to deal everyday with a ton of data that can be used to successfully simulate peoples’ behaviours across the world. What we currently lack as researchers or engineers are the means to do that. I believe that the industry is in need of a new method that correlates our current approaches with the variety of data that we collect everyday.

Getting ready

I strongly believe that sooner or later, we will come across an elegant solution to this problem. The next generation of UXers will be enabled by a set of tools and methods which will make data for UX as valuable they are currently for economics or physics, enabling us not only to validate designs as we currently do with A/B testing, but to predict the outcome of any design. In other words, the day that we will stop designing in the dark is not far away.