I’ll just say it — I hate data-driven design.
I’ll be honest: data is everywhere today, and piles of numbers are taking over the essence of design and vision. This isn’t coming because of hate towards data or because I dont believe in listening to the users. However, even the parts of design that should be guided by taste, instinct, and vision are somehow taken over by data.
Nowadays, every design decision seems to need a justification in the form of an A/B test, a heatmap, a conversion rate chart, or some “insight” from a dashboard. It’s no longer enough for a designer to say, “This just feels right.” That’s treated like heresy in modern product teams. If the numbers don’t agree, your taste doesn’t matter.
And that’s a problem.
Many of the best designs in the world did not come from testing 40 shades of blue or measuring CTR; it came from people with a powerful and willing point of view. People who valued aesthetics and understood its real worth. People who made some courageous decisions, not because data told them, but because they believed they were creating something worth believing in.
Data-driven design kills exactly that, it trains designers to aim for whether or not this will perform, rather than if it will inspire. It encourages safe choices, not bold ones; it rewards familiarity and not originality. You usually end up at the interface that is optimised and soulless. It struggles to incorporate the necessary feedback and human elements. Every button is placed where the heatmap says it should be. Every colour is chosen because it converted 0.2% better in a test. And everything starts to look the same.
I think great designs arent just about efficiency, they are all the emotions, contexts, storytelling anf even a little bit of drama. Some random surprise elements, delight and beauty is all it take to create these moments. But whrn it needs to be justified with metrics or charts, there is no room for that . Data measures everything very crucially and theres no reward here for nuances, it flattens out everything into what gets more clicks.
What gets worse is that data-driven designs kill trust within the teams. Designers aren’t seen as creators but as UI mechanics waiting for instruction from analysts and PM’s. A vision slowly becomes something that we are told isnt scalable.
Of course, we can’t ignore data; look around everywhere, and you will only find data around you. However, what we need to stop doing is that the data is suitable for designs, but it’s not!!. Designs cannot be reduced to numbers, and sometimes the best design choices are the ones that dont win the A/B tests because it makes people feel something. Because it makes us think and has a soul.
And that should still matter. It should matter the most, as much as anything else.
Blog post which inspired me to write this post – link