Hi everyone, my friends and I are creating a platform, Vizly, to help designers to design faster and communicate better with their clients.
Currently, we want to use AI to provide more feedback to designers so they can design more efficiently. We would like to know whether the features that we are developing would be helpful for your design process.
Feature 1: Evaluate how popular your design is and recommend changes to make your design more popular
Feature 2: Predict and track where people look at when they see your design.
We want to validate our ideas about helping designers. Please leave a comment about your thoughts here. We would really appreciate your input!
Feature #2 might be useful, but there is already plenty of eye-track principle information available, and good designers already account for it when they design.
Feature #1 is of no value. Popularity is not an objective of graphic design.
I am not going to consider #2, but human nature dictates that:
I would keep this secret to myself (well, in this case, you and your friend), and apply to as many clients as humanly possible, get obscenely rich, and take this great secret to the grave, or
Do as you are doing now, mindful that the believer and non-believer ratio being 3 : 97, give or take. This might not get you rich, and also run the risk of getting heck from the 97.
Thank you for putting forward the dilemma! We initially thought about using it as a tool that requires clients’ consent (for the tracking), but it’s an ethical problem worth thinking through.
Can you elaborate a little more about the focus groups part? Do you mean focus groups are proper demographics study, and the popularity only matters if the designer focuses on the particular focus group?
The objective of graphic design is to advance the client’s business objectives through the conveyance of a message.
There are no metrics to evaluate design in a direct sense, but the response rate, if applicable, and the related effect on financial results of the client’s business may be correlated to evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign of which a design is a part.
I’m a bit late to the party, but I agree with the others that popularity is not typically the objective of good design. Good design is about solving problems.
When I worked at a newspaper, I relied heavily on eye tracking studies to assist in the design of the paper, so I can imagine your second feature being useful if done right. However, I’m having difficulty imagining how that would happen. Designing a multi-page publication is far different from designing, for example, a software icon or a product label, the face of a clock or a comprehensive and strategy-driven branding package.
Regarding focus groups — I’ve sat behind the two-way mirror in dozens of them. The participants are never told the purpose of the session until the end of the session. They’re never asked in a straight-forward way whether or not they like something (at least until the very end), since it always results in subjective responses. Instead, the person conducting the session eases into the subject matter in a very roundabout way to pick up clues to how people respond to things when they’re not being asked.
Thank you for taking the time to write this informative feedback! I totally agree that designing a multi-page publication or videos for marketing purpose is really different from designing.
I mostly do design for the commercial market, so my main concern is giving the client what they need (not always what they want). Aside from technical issues like balance and use of space, this is all that really matters.
A good brief from the client is essential, and I sometimes ask them who this needs to impress (their target audience). I have no interest whatsoever in what other designers or anyone else might think - if the client likes it and I have done it properly, it is a good design.