As a web designer, you need to keep on top of a number of trends to stay on the cutting edge of your profession. Some of these trends, like fashion, are stylistic and ephemeral. Others, however, reflect a deep change in technology.
One trend that is rooted in a technological shift is how Big Data is greatly influencing web design. This is not a trend that will dissipate or be replaced by another aesthetic choice. Instead, it’s a trend that will only get more established in the years to come.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to understand what is meant by the term “big data” and how it affects your work as a web-designer.
How Big Is Big Data?
Big data is a large volume of structured and unstructured data.
According to CloudTweaks, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every single day. That’s 2.5 with 18 zeros. They also say: “Looking forward, experts now predict that 40 zettabytes of data will be in existence by 2020. Three years ago, the entire World Wide Web is estimated to contain approximately 500 exabytes – which is 5 billion gigabytes, but only half of one zettabyte! 40 zettabytes is, therefore, 400 billion gigabytes!”
How Big Data Affects Web Design
Web designers have to design web solutions that will be able to handle massive amounts of data. Their goal will be to capture relevant data and use it to further a website’s goal.
In other words, we’re talking about data-driven design. Large amounts of data will have to be arranged and presented in a way that helps the clients reach website’s goals, like attracting more visitors and providing them with a high quality of service to boosts conversion rate optimization.
Benefits of Data-Driven Design
How will you use data to determine your design?
Here are some possibilities:
- You could use it to improve iterative design.
- You could use it to gather information on how people respond to the design.
- You could use it to understand how visitors benefit from the content presented on a website.
- You could use data visualization to get feedback to enhance future automation.
Your data-driven design will be used by a variety of different industries to improve products and services. For example, the healthcare industry will use data-driven design to get a better grasp of patient’s medical history so that they can determine the best treatment options. Big data will also help this industry get an understanding about patient’s background information—like where they live and the work they do for a living. This information will help them improve the delivery of patient care.
Criteria for Design
As a designer you will need to get clear on 3 factors when talking to a client about their website:
- 1. Goals. You will need to understand what clients hope to achieve with their website and what data is relevant for these goals.
- 2. Data processing. You will need to understand the structure of this data. This will include understanding the source of the data and how much of it is processed through the website. In other words, what’s the source, or starting point, and what’s the convergence, or end point?
- 3. Platform. Based on understanding the website’s goals and the type of data it will manage, you will be able to suggest the best platform. How, in other words, can you best support the movement of data through the system?
Guidelines
When designing the website, here are a few useful guidelines:
- 1. Testing. Slowly introduce the data into the platform, rather than simply inundating the platform with a large volume of data. This will allow you to understand how your structure manages to process large amounts of data in real time.
- 2. Updating. Figure out how to keep the data relevant. Data can quickly become dated, so you will have to have some mechanisms for updating data and keep it fresh and current.
- 3. Feedback loops. Use feedback loops to measure how data moves through a system. Feedback will allow you to tweak analytics to improve evaluations. Consistently optimizing resources will provide the basis for increasingly more accurate data-based predictions.
The Winning Edge
All things being equal, a company with a higher quality of business intelligence will flourish in the marketplace.
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