The secrets data won't tell you It’s become standard to lean on quantitative, experiment-driven design, especially when decisions must be made quickly and with very little time and resources. But this method often only reveals surface-level themes and not much about your users’ true intentions. In this onboarding case study, Vicki will walk you through how we learned to design using intuition, blending science and design research to create a solution that met our users’ needs. About Vicki Vicki is a Product Designer at Headspace, creating experiences to guide new users towards a healthy meditation practice. Previously, she was at Lyft, optimizing the passenger ride experience, and at Google, designing tools for reducing bias and predicting outcomes. Prior to Google, Vicki was at Stanford School of Medicine coordinating research studies in Pediatric Oncology. She holds a degree in Behavioral Psychology from the University of California, San Diego.

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions. But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.