> Everyone bullshits at some point, but there seems to me to be a particular desire to show design decisions as being based in some empirical facts. In some ways this is admirable, and forces designers to justify their design decisions. Analytics have certainly been one cause of this.

As a designer I've always felt that the larger and more important chunk of design work is purely intuitive. Analytics implies time-dependence which is counterproductive to design when included upfront.

The only time quantifiable metrics are used is when a design is married to user experience in the context of a user interface (in the end product). At that point, patterns and practices dictate the baseline from which feedback takes place. This is commonly referred to as a design system and is done on a larger horizontal scale across interfaces (web, mobile, print, and so on).

Company branding, medium | message, target audience, color schemes/themes and other aspects of functional design are comprised more of intuition than raw analytics, in my opinion. Apple provides a great example of design choices that focus on the human aspect first. [0]

Added to that, the fact that market share is happily split amongst vastly different UI approaches is testament to the non-linear nature of design.

While designers are plenty, good design is not. Science based models as cited in the article are there to bring up the rear in a standardized manner but don't provide avenues to true "novelty" that defines great design. Just my two cents.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...