INTRODUCTION

LinkedIn’s UED (User Experience Design) Research team is “little” (8) relative to the company (6000+). The qualitative data we gather is even more vastly dwarfed, by orders of magnitude. A UED Researcher might target and interview 12 people for a project, while her counterparts in Product and Marketing are measuring interactions in the millions. Like many global companies, our product design and development process is built on a foundation of behavioral data, real-time metrics, algorithms and predictive models. In a word (or two) “big data.” In this environment, our team has established a strong foothold for our work alongside our big data counterparts, squarely in the realm of design.

Big data holds undeniable power. It informs and increasingly shapes the products and services that make up our world. In this paper, we use the term “little” playfully, in the David and Goliath sense. In practice, it’s not us against them, and it’s not even a battle. Our small team of qualitative researchers has an outsized impact because of the inherent power of the approach, and our single-minded focus on impacting design. Because we sit within the UED group, alongside Interaction Designers, Web Developers and Writers/Editors, our ability to create impact in design is secured. Our team’s is a success story, but not without the occasional plot twist. We would like to boast that collaborations always result in mutual alleluias and allegiance. In reality, however, at times both sides must exercise diplomacy at the border where big and little data meet. Though at first our work may seem to defy logic to those worshipping at the big data altar, and vice versa, open minds benefit greatly from an approach that has room for both.

DATA AND DESIGN

Big data is gathered, discussed, debated and leveraged in a number of ways.

Big data is traded as an asset or a commodity. Abby Margolis talks about our “digital exhaust” being traded and monetized, suggesting that many people are “convinced that big data will become the world’s most important resource, the fuel for the next economy.” (Margolis, 32) This is most often experienced as targeted advertising.

Another way big data impacts our lives is in the increasingly mainstream “quantified self” movement. In 2010, Gary Wolf talked about the proliferation of mobile devices and biometric sensors, which allow us to increasingly capture data about our habits and behavior to “reflect, learn, remember and improve.” (Wolf)

He also suggested that, beyond contributing to self-knowledge, these personal data sets combine with social networks and distribution platforms to create interesting opportunities to contribute to public health research and biometric security.

Perhaps the most interesting consequences of the self-tracking movement will come when its adherents merge their findings into databases. The Zeo, for example, gives its users the option of making anonymized data available for research; the result is a database orders of magnitude larger than any other repository of information on sleep stages…this type of database could help to redefine healthy sleep behavior. (Singer)

We observed a recent example of what this looks like after the recent South Napa earthquake on August 24^th. Data Scientists from Jawbone aggregated data from thousands of local UP users who were tracking their sleep that night.

Our data science team wanted to quantify its effect on sleep…Napa, Sonoma, Vallejo, and Fairfield were less than 15 miles from the epicenter. Almost all (93%) of the UP wearers in these cities suddenly woke up at 3:20AM when the quake struck. Farther from the epicenter, the impact was weaker and more people slept through the shaking. In San Francisco and Oakland, slightly more than half (55%) woke up. (Mandel)