Will big data be used increasingly in the UX field to answer user experience questions?

Yes and no.

Big Data provides… well, big data. Lots of data. This data needs to be parsed, analyzed and understood. It is (potentially) a source for user insights and understanding that is unparalleled. It can provide a lot of answers into what users are doing, where they are doing it, and how they are doing it. So yes, Big Data will increasingly be used by companies to understand user behavior (many tech companies like Google have been doing it long before the term “Big Data” even existed).

But Big Data cannot tell us WHY users do things with real certainty. What motivates users, what their psychographic and emotional landscape is… it can be inferred from Big Data but not (in my opinion) to any degree of certainty. It will still take ethnographic research and usability testing to gain those particular insights (or at least identify them with any real confidence).

And I don’t state this because I love user research – though I do. I state it because I have worked with Big Data and I have seen its limitations. And Big Data is only as “good” as the data points that are captured. If you do not have the specific data you need to inform design decisions, it’s useless.

Finally, there is the question of access. Big Data tends to be mostly used in Enterprises, and even then access to the data is very limited. Until Big Data becomes available to access by design teams at mid-level companies and agencies, Big Data will not replace or supplement good old fashioned user research.

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