I am sitting at the tail end of a SXSW panel tackling the question “Does A/B testing kill design?”. Throughout the session I am constantly reminded of yesterday’s panel on “Does Analytics kill design?”. Quite simply, the answer is NO.

This seems to be similar to the discussions from the mid-nighties between those who supported traditional design tools and those who embraced new digital design tools. Either way, it’s just a tool, just a means to an end. In the same vein, analytics and testing are just tools that designers can use in their craft.

It’s evident from both of these panels that testing and analytics are good for incremental improvements only. I wonder if a large company or design firm could lump the work of looking at the numbers and testing small  tweaks into a “design maintenance” team. In much the same way that a 2nd-tier support team handles the development maintenance, a complimentary team could work on design maintance. This would free the lead designers to work wit the lead developers to tackle the larger “revolutionary” design problems.

I find it very interesting that in this panel the eBay designer is the strongest supporter of heavy use of A/B testing in the design process. eBay is the only company on this panel with a site that functions 95% the same as it did in 1999.