Designing with Data

Chapter 1. Introducing a Data Mindset

Data as a Trend

DATA. THIS SHORT WORD has captured the imagination of the media. Every day, another news story breaks that preaches the power of “big data,” discussing the value of data for business, data for adaptive technology experiences, or data and marketing. It’s clear that regardless of the application, data is a very hot topic and the currency of the day.

It might feel like using data is big news now, but the truth is that we’ve been using data for a long time in the internet business. Data in the form of digital content and activity traces is at the core of internet experiences. For the past 20 years, we’ve been inventing new digital experiences and re-creating physical world experiences in the digital world. Sharing photos, having conversations, finding love: activities that we perform in our daily lives have all become digital. Being digital means we can log and track these activities with ease. Digital interfaces have made data collection so easy that now our biggest challenge is not access to data, it’s avoiding the false belief that data is always good, and recognizing that interpreting the data and deriving meaning from it is itself a challenging task. In other words, the ease of gathering data can lead us to be lazy in our thinking, resulting in erroneous conclusions if the data quality is low or unrepresentative or the data analysis is flawed.

There’s more potential here than collecting any and all data, of course. The “digital ...