Yahoo! Digits: A Design Driven to Provide Instant ‘Data Driven Insights’ and its Use in User Experience Design

Yahoo! Digits is an internal web analytics tools designed to provide data driven insights for Yahoo! products. The paper outlines the principles of Digits design involving – personalization, insight driven information design and scalable UI architecture. It also focuses on how Digits is helping designers in understanding their product and users better. Data analysis can be used for evaluating design impact and drives design insights; along with other qualitative methods like user testing, user research, ethnography etc. Discussing data driven design, paper primarily outlines the two essential methods of using data – one as a support to a known issue where data is used to prove and/or understand the scale of a known issue. Other is to drive insights through analysis of data, which the paper terms as ‘data driven insight’. The data can be used in understanding user demographics, engagement, customer insights, comparative benchmarking, etc. The paper talks about how the core analytics principles of metric, dimension and friends metric can be used for data driven insights. It also highlights how Digits provides ‘context driven’ information design and features to help provide data driven insights instantly.