While there is still a difference, it’s much harder to properly define what it is. Both have similar styles, capitalizations, and more.This is where Ash comes in. By analyzing a person’s choice between each of the two examples it converts the choice into its algebraic representation. Ash allows Tailor to work the seemingly abstract choices people make into a more deterministic design.
Math has always been an amazing tool in abstracting things, and at Tailor, we’ve used it to take something that has been traditionally un-measurable, and measure it. However, it’s still all within a person’s taste. We’re using math to try and figure out their inclination, which can be tricky. Just because they choose a certain design once, doesn’t mean that’s 100% their style. How do we hone it in? We show them multiple choices, which gives us more data to make a better design.
Once we have several of this person’s choices, we average them all out and compare them using more math to other styles within our system to find the best-matching styles for each personal taste. These comparisons help dictate the different design options we show on our site.
While this is only one part of our design decision-making algorithms, it carries more weight than most. As with everything else, we accept that our algorithms and processes are not yet completely perfect. Because of this, we use different user inputs and their final purchases (which you can view as votes on design) to better train Ash in its understanding of this design-vector space.
Many people wonder where is the “human element” in our systems, and while it is present in many places, the most significant one is our customers. Your choices and decisions teach Ash, the Tailor team, and all of our other systems more than we could ever hope to learn on our own.
While this was a deeper dive than most reads from the Tailor team, I hope it gave you a small glimpse into how we use the different information in our design process. We are on an ever-evolving journey to build the best possible design engine, and as you can see based on the small glimpse it is very challenging, but also extremely interesting.