I’ve noticed a tendency for folks in business settings to talk about design as being either “data-oriented” or not. I feel like that does a disservice to qualitative measures like user testing, which are absolutely vital to good design and often left out of people’s notions of what qualifies as “data.”
Qualitative measures can generate more forward-looking and predictive insights than quantitative measures, like analytics, because they reveal why something is happening, not just what.