Over the past few years there has been a trend towards data driven design. A movement where everything is tested and tweaked to ensure that it 'measurably improves ROI' before it ever sees the light of day.
The problem with this approach is that you can only 'measurably' improve what you can measure and feelings are notoriously hard things to quantify.
What is easy to measure are clicks, purchases and open rates. All that cold hard data. After a time clients and agencies become driven by the measurement - "we must improve click through by 3% or this page is a failure" or "let's A/B test it and the winner goes live".
What this leads to is Amazon.com. Highly 'efficient' but soulless, copycat, cookie-cutter digital experiences.
Data driven design kills the unique, weird, exciting, confusing, memorable digital experiences. The kind of experience that feels like the brand, that makes you smile, makes you angry, that you actually tell your friends about.
I mourn for real experimentation, for unique digital experiences and for slow death of humanity on the web and UX teams are part of the problem.
We need a reset, it's our role as experience practitioners to pick our battles, to champion and fight for powerful, memorable experiences - not everything needs to be usable and useful.
