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Part of being an expert is finding the right balance between accumulated knowledge and tactical flexibility. "Intuition" and "common sense" are nothing more th
by jfarmer 17y ago
Part of being an expert is finding the right balance between accumulated knowledge and tactical flexibility.
"Intuition" and "common sense" are nothing more than predjudices. They may be right; after all, prejudices are usually founded in real-life experiences.
The problem comes when you over-generalize those experiences and crystalize that over-generalization as knowledge.
A silly example: you run a test on a website about button colors and red is the best color and that it made a large difference.
There are a lot of lessons you could possible take from this, e.g.,
1. Users prefer red buttons over any other color
2. You should always test button color
3. It's important to think about what draws users' eyes and test that, including buttons.
4. It's important to test everything, no matter how small
Learning (1) is probably wrong. Red might work in this situation, but not in another. This is the problem with learning tactics in general. As the competitive landscape evolves or the situation "on the ground" changes specific tactics become less useful, and might even be worse than an alternative you've precluded because of your "expertise."
(2) and (3) are probably good lessons to take away. (3) is better because it opens your eyes to new, possibly fruitful things to test, although (2) isn't bad.
(4) is the opposite of (1) in that it's an overbroad lesson that is hard to apply and if done religiously would probably paralyze the decision-making process.
Anyhow, that's how I think about applying "data-driven" processes to business, marketing, and product decisions.
- edave 17y agoInteresting, how do you feel about all the talk on Google's data-driven UI development?
- jfarmer 17y agoIn principle I think it's fine, but from the story it sounds like the decision-making process was busted. What I've found is that companies that live or die by data don't have better arguments, necessarily, they just have different arguments. At the end of the day it's about someone making a decision and taking responsibility for it. Sometimes forward momentum and the feelings of your employees are more important than minute details like that. The story was more about Marissa Meyer's ego and how she uses the data-driven process at Google to frustrate her internal enemies, IMO, and less about the specific fact that they tested 41 shades of blue. Personally I'd just make a decision and get on with it. If, for whatever reason, we thought the shade of blue would really, really matter you can always test it latter. The risk of being data-driven is that you wind up in a world of Cartesian uncertainty. Do I really know ANYTHING? What if this thing I don't think matters really DOES matter? Doesn't that mean I should test every detail no matter how small? Anyhow, these are issues you have to grapple with when you commit to being data-driven. There's no simple answer, although it's easy for Google to justify testing every single thing because they have a gargantuan amount of traffic and even an improvement of a fraction of a percent could mean millions of dollars in revenue won or lost.