Rigour and resonance
UX gets described as a science by people defending a budget and as an art by people defending a decision. Both descriptions are self-serving and both are partly right, which is what makes the argument permanent.
The honest position is that they answer different questions and neither answers the other’s.
What each is good for
Research is good at falsification. It tells you people can’t find the button, that the form loses them at step three, that the word you chose means something else to half your users. These are facts, they’re cheap to establish, and ignoring them is just expensive.
What research cannot do is generate the option. No amount of study produces the idea; it only evaluates the ideas you brought. Teams that over-index on evidence end up refining a mediocre concept with great discipline.
Craft is what produces the candidate — the leap, the arrangement, the thing that feels obvious once seen and wasn’t derivable from any interview. It’s also what makes a correct solution feel worth using, which is not a decorative concern. Two products that test identically can differ entirely in whether anyone chooses them.
Sequence, not blend
The pairing works as alternation, not average. Diverge with craft — generate more than you need, unjustified. Converge with evidence — kill what doesn’t survive contact. Averaging the two produces a design nobody argued for and research nobody acted on.
Email cadence is the standard collision. Tests reliably show that sending more lifts opens and clicks inside the measurement window, because people who will unsubscribe do it slowly and people who quietly stop reading never register at all. The data is real. It answers a two-week question, and the decision is a two-year one — which makes it a judgement call wearing the clothes of an experiment.
Where it breaks
The framing is used, most often, to protect whichever half is failing.
“Data can’t capture everything” is true and is also the standard defence of a designer overriding a clear result. “Let’s test it” is true and is the standard way to defer a decision nobody wants to own. Both sentences are correct in general and usually deployed instrumentally, and the harmony framing gives cover to both.
There’s also a resourcing reality that the balanced version ignores. Real rigour is expensive — recruiting, sessions, analysis, enough participants to mean anything. Most teams don’t have it and never will, which means most “research” is four conversations and a survey, presented with a confidence the sample can’t support. That is often still worth doing. It is not evidence in the sense the word implies, and pretending otherwise is worse than admitting you’re operating on informed taste.
Takeaway: use evidence to inform aesthetics.