Intuition vs Analytics in UX

Much like economics, UX is a very polarized field. On one hand, you have the traditional practitioners who believe good UX is solely the product of good intuition. These people tend to have backgrounds in design, psychology, marketing, and other arts/social sciences. On the other camp, we find the quants who believe everything can be objectively distilled into numbers. These individuals most likely received an education in an area related to data science. As in many other polarized arguments, the best answer lies somewhere in between. A successful UX team will know where exactly to draw the line on every instance.

Here’s what I’ve learned thus far:

• Raw data is not actionable. The analysis of data (which is subjective) provides us with actionable insight. Good analysis requires intuition. It’s all about asking the right questions (garbage in, garbage out).

• Intuition and Data-Driven are more related than most people realize. Intuition is an unconscious form of data-analysis our brain produces from experiential data.

• While some people are naturally better at being intuitive, performing data analysis regularly will likely improve your intuition. Similarly, a person with good intuition will come up with better hypotheses and have successful experiments more often than an intuition-less data savant.

• Analytics are great for making incremental changes. Should navigation be on the page header or on the side? Should a button say “Click Here” or “Clicky!”? Intuition is a better way to make aesthetics and product personality decisions.

• Analytics are great for finding inspiration. Perusing through data for a couple hours can yield a lot of great ideas. Intuition is required to evaluate which one of those insights has a high potential ROI. We have countless examples of features that were originally inspired by a newly discovered correlation/outlier/etc.

• Analytics are great for making sure mistakes get mitigated quickly. If your dashboard shows steep changes after deploy (good or bad), a thorough investigation should follow to understand cause and effect.

• Intuition is better for driving vision. A large organization cannot move in a cohesive direction without a powerful vision. A long term vision is hard to encapsulate inside a spreadsheet or a chart. One caveat is that not everyone in the organization can have their own custom vision or execution becomes chaotic.

With all that said, the actual metrics/KPIs used will likely be very tied to the product. There are plenty of commonly used metrics, such as daily active users, time per session, and retention. However, UX cannot directly be measured, so all you have are proxies. None of those tells you how much value the user is getting, even net promoter score is a derivation. Some of the best KPIs are very tied to the business value proposition. For example Yelp focuses on cumulative number of reviews, wikipedia on edits and active editors, and What’s App on daily messages.