I am not sure anyone has said that stats are not useful. I think the general notion here is of caution. When working with statistics, you are basically manipulating some of the variances in order to isolate and observe other variances. The very nature of statistics is in fact data manipulation. Even an R-square distorts the data, in spite of it often being very telling.
In particular, when I hear vague or compound stats being thrown around I get a bit testy. The other day I heard an NPR voice reporting that in 5% of results, the respondents were almost 3 times more likely to show improvement over the control group. What the heck does that mean? It has the potential to be grossly misinterpreted. The final bit of caution, is that stats and data should inform the design, not make the decision for them. Mark On Wednesday, November 28, 2007, at 12:30PM, "Robert Hoekman, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> It is true that stats/quantitative data can only tell us the "what", but >> people seem to be implying that this is not useful information. I find that >> very strange. > > >Amen. Our job is to apply our knowledge and experience and such to the >"what" and figure out the "why" so it can be improved. Without the data, you >can only guess. With the data, you can guess well. > >-r- ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
