Is a designer that bases their designs on numbers, not aesthetics or user experience, really designers?
Usability studies have so many confounding variables that it's not even funny. It's not hard to pick studies to support anything. As if that wasn't enough, they're highly contextual and inevitably used in a completely different context.
None of the well known great designers of the past century relied on A/B studies to do what they did. Granted, they likely delivered a lot of duds too, but at least those designs could be identified as bad.
Designs with statistics behind them can never be bad because the numbers haven't changed, and the numbers was what motivated the change in the first place.
Usability studies have so many confounding variables that it's not even funny. It's not hard to pick studies to support anything. As if that wasn't enough, they're highly contextual and inevitably used in a completely different context.
None of the well known great designers of the past century relied on A/B studies to do what they did. Granted, they likely delivered a lot of duds too, but at least those designs could be identified as bad.
Designs with statistics behind them can never be bad because the numbers haven't changed, and the numbers was what motivated the change in the first place.