From Data to Insight

User-centered design asks people to go out in the field and run inquiries to understand users. But it’s still a challenge to see what matters when you’re there. The user’s world is complex, overwhelming, and full of a million details—some of which matter for any design problem and many of which don’t. As user research teams and organizations have become more common, it has become a larger problem to communicate insight from the user research to the whole product team, so that everyone can see what matters. Contextual Design has always used models of the user to communicate; with Contextual Design 2.0, we've expanded those models to communicate the aspects of design that matter for today's highly connected technology. In this chapter we discuss the problems of representing user data to reveal what is going on across an entire market.