What Data Backed Design does
Design debates stall on opinion. The question that ends them is “what do the best teams actually do?”, but answering it usually means hours of digging through design-system docs, research, and help centers. Data Backed Design does that digging ahead of time, so you can ask a UI/UX or design-process question and get an answer in a minute. Every answer gives you:
- A direction
- One recommendation, or a clear rule for when to pick which option. Not a survey of possibilities.
- The reasoning
- Why that direction holds up for the problem you described.
- Cited evidence
- What named companies actually document and ship, with each claim linked to the page it came from.
- The tradeoffs
- What the recommendation costs you, stated plainly, even when the evidence is settled.
The goal is a decision you can defend in a review, backed by sources you can open yourself.
How it works
Four rules shape every answer.
Published sources only
The corpus is built from material anyone can open: 50 sources, from the documentation of design systems like Carbon, Polaris, and GOV.UK to the help centers of products teams use every day and usability research from groups like Nielsen Norman Group and Baymard Institute. Nothing comes from private products or guesswork about them.
Every quote checked
Each of the 1,711 evidence cards quotes its source word for word. Before a card is published, a checker fetches the live page and confirms the quote is really there, and the card records when it was verified.
Counted, not guessed
Each of the 12 topics is broken into the questions designers actually argue about, and the same core set of design systems is tallied on every one. That is where the counts in an answer come from. When a source says nothing, it is recorded as silent rather than stretched to fit, and when sources split, the answer names who sits on each side.
Answers from the evidence only
Your question pulls the most relevant cards from the corpus, and the answer is written from those cards alone. Citations to anything that was not retrieved are removed before you see them. If the corpus has nothing on your question, the answer says so instead of improvising.
Who makes it
Data Backed Design is made by Mark Uraine (opens in a new tab), a product designer with 20 years in design.
Over those years the same arguments kept coming back: where filters belong, when validation should fire, how critique should run. The fastest way to settle them was always to look at what strong teams had already published, and that took far longer than it should. Data Backed Design is that research, done once and answerable in plain language, with the receipts attached.