The stakeholder experience of UI Design and Data Design are completely different, and I don’t think they should be

#AgileDataWoW

There have been a few conversations lately, in the data communities I am part of around how to get permission to model data before the data engineering work starts.

My reply is typically don’t ask for permission, just do it. Surgeons don’t ask for permission to scrub their hands before cutting people open, they just know its part of good practise in their profession and so they do it.

But as I ruminate on it some more, I think about the comparison with the way we design the UI in the #AgileData App vs the way Data is designed.

When we want to add a new capability in the AgileData App, Kris Slazinski our amazing designer will mock some designs up in Figma.

The purpose of this process is to create something visual that lets us have a conversation, identifies what is important and gives me a patterm I can use to think.

The first designs he creates ends up highlighting a small or large number of questions, and small or large number of choices we need to make, a small or large number of trade off decisions I need to make.

Then we discuss all those questions, those choices, we iterate the designs and I make some decisions.

As the engineering part of our powerhouse, I will discuss these designs with Nigel Vining to see if they are feasble. What can we build quickly, what is potentially a large amount of effort that I should backlog to reduce the size of the bet we are making. The UI designs give him a visual thing he can point to when we have these conversations.

These UI designs provide us with a shared language and a way of reducing the uncertainity of what we will build, before we start building.

This is what the process of Data Design is meant to do, but for some reason it doesn’t.

Why is that?