Cheskin's Ireland applies Best Design Principles to User Data

As with drawing, 'sketch out the big findings first; add detail later'. Christopher Ireland of Cheskin was talking about "Organizing Principles" at the 2AD conference on Appliance Design in Bristol in early May. An advocate of understanding users, she and her company specialise in strategic market research and her talk dealt with how to structure both one's research and then the presentation of it.

She identified three levels at which research was meaningful: culture, market and personal; and showed how each level spoke to a different part of the organisation. While research into individuals' habits and practices was essential: 'I can't emphasis enough how important it is; it is really difficult to get people to change', it was also a useful kind of information to share with designers, whereas marketing people thought at the level of segmentation and markets; and financial people tended to concern themselves with the cultural level - whether a trend or pattern would endure.

She talked through examples of research at each level, amusing the audience with her breakdown of teenage groupings. 'Which were you?' she asked, offering the choice of explorers, visibles, status quo, isolators and non-teens. She then showed how trends generally went through the segments from discoverers who disowned practices as soon as the others caught on to them, right through to non-teens for whom initiation into new styles tended to be led by the parent. At this point, a style was so mainstream as to be no longer a trend.

Ireland confessed herself to be nervous of using quantitative methods, as being too far from the user, making the results too open to misinterpretation.

Instead she offered rigorous analysis and conceptualisation as a way of pushing management further than they would normally go by reducing their sense of the risk.

She then showed slides of analysis of tasks. The breakdown included areas she called 'pain points' presented as solid red boxes and 'opportunities for enhancement' presented as red-framed boxes. In this way, clients could see at a glance where a new product might improve on existing ways of doing things. She referred to a range of presentation styles, from handing over numbers, to website presentations, to videos to acting out the results. 'It's rarely that they want straight data,' she said.

While nothing she showed was revolutionary in methodological terms, what she brought had a tightness and simplicity to it that spoke of the best design values applied to organising data.

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