Kantar Media is a leading market research company. To live up to its reputation as one of the world's largest insight, information, and consultancy groups, the company recently decided to improve and add new products to its application suite. To do so, Kantar embraced the user-centered design principles that we UX designers champion.

Kantar's products used to be region-focused. Their new interface allows users to browse internationally quickly.

Consistency at heart

When deploying a large suite of applications like Kantar, it is important to keep consistency in mind. You want your users to be able to tell in a blink of an eye that they are using your products. Even more importantly, you want to make sure that the experience is consistent across all of your apps.

For this particular task, I focused on understanding the current brand identity and making sure that everything felt truly "Kantar-like." Being able to communicate with the talented people who previously worked on Kantar's products was a blessing.

A complete redesign of the dictionary allows users to browse by social categories and other criteria.

Understanding the requirements

As designers, we always love to be there from the start, creating new experiences from scratch and imagining brand new ways of doing things. But the truth is, most of us won't be so lucky as to work from start to finish on all of our projects.

There will be times when you arrive and the product is already half built. That was the case for me when I began working on Kantar's products. Luckily, I happened to know the designer who previously worked with the product team from the start. Thanks to that, I was able to get an initial brief from a designer's point of view and a good first understanding of the product.

Maintaining good relationships within your network is definitely a crucial thing. Design is, after all, about communication. Communicating ideas through simple and clear design.

Of course, the next important step is to "play" quite intensely with the previous version of the product, if there happens to be one. Talk to your client, and if you have the opportunity—and you should—with the users. You need to get in their heads and understand what they need. And that won't happen if you don't engage with them.

From creating marketing campaign targets to displaying results.

If you want to build something truly solid, break it

To build something truly solid, you need to break it first. This means challenging your assumptions and asking questions about every aspect of the project. You need to understand who you are building the product for and what their needs are. If you can't answer every single question about a particular feature, then you need to adjust the scope.