There’s a man in central Texas who’s obsessed with bees. His home office is littered with strange metal cylinders he uses to spin honey from the comb, the corners of his room stacked high with bee boxes. He takes these to different pieces of property and arranges the boxes meticulously based on the flowers common to that area. You can tell the flavor of honey you’ll get simply from the flowers, he’ll say. He even gives honey tastings from his home, jars filled with differing colors—light ambers, golds, and dark smoke-colored varieties that looked more like molasses than honey.
Walking into an average grocery store, you’d never know honey could be so different.
We live in a digital age that feels much the same. Websites like identical plastic containers pumped full of generic golden honey—information and promises and products that all look fresh off an assembly line. No brand differentiation, no way to tell a real product from a counterfeit knockoff. No trust.
This is what we’re left with when Data Driven Design kills creativity: millions of hollow duplicates.
But how do we fix the condition we find our marketing in today? How do we get back to the full-spectrum of flavors that can set us apart from the crowd and foster trust in our brands? To answer that question, we have to understand the role of Data Driven Design and creativity in this new age.
What is Data Driven Design?
Data Driven Design is a complete reliance on collected data to dictate effective design. It looks primarily at metrics like conversion rates and usage statistics, ignoring the creative aspect of design. As you can probably imagine, this has a wide-range of applications, from heat-mapping in large department stores leading to the complete overhaul of a customer’s journey through the retail space to the redesign of a website or online ads based around website bounce rates and conversion metrics—Data Driven Design (DDD) has implications for every product or service.
And when we see the results in numbers, they can be staggering. When Bank of America noticed lackluster results in its online banking enrollment, they set about redesigning the customer journey with one key metric in mind: increased form-fills. Using data from customer interactions site-wide as their sole driver, BoA went about prototyping the new and improved design.
What they saw was shocking. Not only did form-fills increase—they nearly doubled.
It’s clear the power of Data Driven Design isn’t to be underestimated, but is it always enough?
Is Designing Around Data Sufficient?
The truth is, data has limits. As big data becomes a behemoth of modern website design and marketing, with more and more templates offering designers the promise of streamlined desktop and mobile experiences straight out of the box, we start to see troubling trends.
The largest of which is an assembly-line approach to design that homogenizes so much of the web that nothing stands out. Brands become cookie-cutter experiences, lacking any differentiation or style to increase customer identification. When Brand A looks and feels the same as B, C, and D, why should we care?
Its usefulness cannot be understated for certain aspects of design however, like A/B testing of products and ads. Research conducted by Andrea Wiggins from the University of Michigan’s School of Information concluded that website analytics were useful as verification of success in web design, providing concrete numbers behind the actions a user performs in going from site A to B, B to C, and down the line to conversions, but it should not be the basis on which one designs a website or advertisement.
This is because data gives us a picture of what people do, but not why they do it. Why they take a specific action, their feelings at the time, or what “expectations they bring to the experience” (UX Business) are all lacking. For instance, how can we tell the difference between a person who clicked on our product simply because it’s so large on-screen to become a logistical nightmare NOT to click it? Or they liked the color, but hated the cut and we’re hoping something else on the site would have what they’re looking for?
The answer is: we can’t know a customer’s perspective simply by looking at the data, and web designers depending solely on DDD can be misled by these numbers.
The Role of Creativity
Have you ever looked at a new pair of shoes, three clean stripes running down their side and instantly known what brand you’re seeing? Have you traveled through an unfamiliar town, tired and in need of some energy only to see a hunter-green circle with crisp white font hovering in the distance and felt strangely… comforted?
This is the role of Creativity in Design. Data Driven Design has many strengths, but Brand Reputation isn’t one of them. And when it comes to the marketing space, Brand Reputation is everything. We live in an age where products and services are a dime a dozen, all fighting for space in an online ecosystem. Without creativity, there is no differentiation. And without differentiation, what’s to pull your clients or customers back in for another helping?
Benek Lisefski at Modus Magazine put it best: “We’re all scared to experiment and reinvent the wheel, because data’s already proven that the wheels we’ve got work well enough.” And yet, if every vehicle has the same wheels, what’s to pull us to one tire shop over another?
Ultimately, creativity sets us apart, creating distinctive brands that stand out from a pack of look-alikes, turning customers into cheerleaders and ensuring brands don’t just survive, but thrive.
Better Together
If there’s one thing we know at Stinger Studios, it’s that creativity and Data Driven Design perform better when working in unison. Navigate to any truly successful website and you’ll encounter both, side-by-side, taking the customer journey from a rocky road to one of yellow bricks, guiding us to exactly what we need when we need it.
Creativity is the honey in the hive, setting the distinct flavor of our brand and marketing apart from the pack, giving our clients and customers an experience they can trust. But the comb around it is Data Driven Design, giving us a reliable structure to visualize how our customers live in the space we’ve constructed, providing insight to how we can make that space pop and keep them coming back for more.
Data Driven Design and Creativity: both essential parts of the hive. And when built in just the right measure, they make honey that your customers and clients will have a hard time putting away after just one taste.
Written by Taylor Bair