The role of metrics in Web design

Zynga director of product, Siqi Chen, on why designing social games is more 'art' than science

At Eric Ries' Startup Lessons Learned event, held last Friday, one panel came together to discuss how startups should think about Web design in the most cost-effective way. They were among the several hundred people attending the gathering to either share their insights or hear more about the "lean startup way" - an atypical Silicon Valley approach to building a company that calls for quick product releases, constant measurement of those releases, and importantly - learning from those releases.

Siqi Chen, who's interviewed here, was on the panel focused on design. Siqi was cofounder and CEO of Serious Business, a maker of social games that sold to Zynga this past February. Dave McClure, who runs FF Angel, a seed-stage investment program for Founders Fund, moderated the panel asking questions, such as, "What's the role of metrics before a product is released?" and "Is there a zero-sum game between user value and business model?"

After the panel I caught up with Siqi to answer some of those questions in this interview. 

"My favorite quote about design is, 'Design isn’t about how things look, it’s about how things work," said Siqi, quoting Apple's Steve Jobs. "First principle is to figure out what users want... At lean startup, we talk about data-driven development," he said. "The thing about that is that it has a bias toward two things – things that are easy to measure or things that are quick to measure (like if you change a color of a button)… to design a whole new product, there are thousands of decisions to make and some of these things have a long-term impact and our hard to measure.

"That’s where design thinking comes in. Design is a process that you use to come to a good product. Metrics are what you use to make sure your design decisions are correct."

Essentially, what Siqi means is that while metrics are a good way to measure the impact of the design,  ultimately, metrics - or perhaps even science - can't answer, or even know the complexities of human nature. 

"You can't test every single decision," he said. "Pre-launch [of a product] is a lot of qualitative measurements."

Of course, Siqi mentioned, there are some cool tools to use, including Usertesting.com, a service that charges $39 for a person to play around with your service for an hour, and speak out loud about what they do or don't understand. Zynga used this service to videotape about 30 to 40 users playing one of its games before the game launched.

I also asked Siqi what the importance of visual design is over the utility of the service, and how Web design has changed now that he's working at Zynga (600-plus employees) vs Serious Business (30-plus employees).

Siqi said that nothing has changed about the approach to design since at Zynga most groups work autonomously, it's like 10 startups inside one company. You'll have to watch to hear his answer about visual design over the utility of the product.