Do researchers understand visual design?

NO

Andrew Doyle
Chairman
Holmes & Marchant

During the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale spent months gathering statistics on the causes of death in military hospitals.

When she got the chance to present her case for sanitary reform to the government, she knew she couldn’t risk them missing the seriousness of the problem.

So instead of reeling off bamboozling figures, she presented her findings in the form of graphs and a very famous modified pie chart. The results were impossible to ignore, instantly understandable and just as compelling today as they were in the 1850s. You can see at a glance that most soldiers had died not from battle but from communicable disease, and how better hygiene measures instantly turned this around.

In a letter to Sidney Herbert, who chaired the Royal Commission investigating deaths in the Crimea, Nightingale wrote that “none but scientific men ever look into the appendix of a report.” She wanted her findings to get through to the “vulgar public”.

That was 150 years ago. Nowadays, the public has access to more data than ever before. But to counter this, a new science has emerged – that of research design. Watch any TV news programme or look at any news site and you’ll see a range of innovative presentations of facts and figures that might otherwise seem uninteresting.

People have realised that stats are inherently boring, and the more we have, the less we notice them. A good infographic (and we’re talking about more than the odd pie chart or graph) allows you to make sense of the data that we’re bombarded with. People are increasingly expecting information to be presented in this way – after seeing an animated infographic on the internet, no stack of figures can ever compare again.

And yet, how is the vast majority of market research still presented? As tables, reams of figures and the odd pie chart or graph. And let me tell you, your clients aren’t Nightingale’s “scientific men” – they are regular people, and consumers too. They are also drowning in data and need help to turn it into useful information and insights that they can act upon.

Well-presented data also allows marketers to do their job better – to communicate these crucial findings internally to peers and the board.

While market researchers are great at producing research, their output is often (necessarily) dense, detailed and dull. Their raison d’être is the accumulation and interpretation of data. They do not seem to see it as being within their remit to make that data easy to understand and absorb.

Even when they try to make sense of their data, they do a job to make designers wince, with all the worst that PowerPoint has to offer: clip art, 3D text, drop shadows and every colour available, leaving the viewer even more confused.

Market research companies don’t currently employ enough people who are design-literate. Instead, their staff are just data-literate. These people are necessary – but you now need designers too.

That’s why companies are going to designers to make sense of the 200-page PowerPoint print-out that otherwise is going to sit in a drawer, unread and unacted upon.

And never mind terrible graphs or injudicious use of clip art – being ignored is the worst thing that can happen to carefully thought-out, expensive and maybe even business-critical research. If your research isn’t easy to understand, you’re throwing money down the drain – and currently, market researchers simply cannot make it easy to understand.

YES

Andrew Tharme
Managing director
SPA Future Thinking

The urban myth of researchers as dull and dusty is all-too prevalent, so I can see where Andrew Doyle is coming from when he suggests that designers are better placed to bring data to life than the data gatherers themselves.

But he’s mistaken. Although there are research organisations still out there that are driven purely by the process and the resulting charts Doyle so deplores, they are a dying breed.

Many more research specialists today are turning themselves around in understanding the need to present their findings and insights more palatably and in more useful formats. We’re not only masters in the art and craft of often complex number-crunching; we have an intrinsic and hard-won understanding of the markets in which we work, coupled with knowledge of how they can be improved through research.

We’re also becoming equally adept at presenting our intelligence within a context that is meaningful and relevant to the myriad stakeholders to whom we communicate. Having worked collaboratively with clients on any given project, we know what the business objectives are and how to deliver findings in an appropriate format.

Those ennui-inducing charts are kept to a minimum. What we want is to have conversations with people and help them achieve their business objectives. That’s our bread and butter. At SPA Future Thinking we’ve even done a gameshow format to communicate data that was particularly complex and needed a high level of interactivity and involvement to be properly understood.

That notwithstanding, it’s important not to lose sight of the main goal of research in the commercial context: to provide substantiated insight.

Obviously communicating this information clearly and effectively is a critical part of the process and researchers have a cornucopia of data visualisation, infographics and other tools to help us do this.

This makes it all too easy to get hung up on the delivery channel rather than the intelligence itself. Data visualisation guru Vitaly Friedman, a man who clearly hasn’t forgotten the importance of design to research, said: “To convey ideas effectively, both aesthetic form and functionality need to go hand in hand, providing insights into a rather sparse and complex data set by communicating its key aspects in a more intuitive way. Yet designers often fail to achieve a balance between design and function, creating gorgeous [executions] which fail to serve their main purpose — to communicate information.”

So I don’t think research has forgotten the importance of design. I believe today’s research professionals are better placed than many designers to get their core insights through to clients in a way that’s not just memorable but useful.