Data-Driven Design Workshop

Duration: 3 - 4 hours
Format: In-Person or Virtual

Learn how to conduct effective client research, analyze data, and identify trends and insights to inform design solutions.

Data plays a crucial role in the decision-making process. You wouldn’t pack for a vacation without checking the weather first, right?

The same principle applies to the design process. As designers, it is important to understand the end-users’ behaviors, preferences, and needs when developing recommendations for a client's space. This understanding can be achieved by gathering and analyzing data to extract insights aimed at addressing end-users’ needs.

Understanding what data to gather and how to analyze it requires skill, practice, and refinement to present stakeholders with information they need to inform the decision-making process. I have been refining my practice over the past 10 years and have developed this workshop to address what I wish I would had known when I first started.

Workshop Overview

In this interactive, hands-on workshop, participants will learn the framework they need to gather data to inform design decisions and develop data-driven solutions.

In this session, we will walk through an interactive case study where participants will learn how to design effective data-gathering engagements, analyze and interpret real-time data, and summarize their findings into actionable recommendations.

After the workshop, participants will be able to:

  • Conduct effective end-user research

  • Identify trends + insights

  • Craft a narrative to support the data

  • Summarize Key Findings + Recommendations

Workshop Concentration

Gathering Qualitative Data with Surveys

I also offer a workshop concentration for groups looking to deepen their expertise with designing survey questions. In this concentration, participants will learn how to:

  • Define data-gatherings objectives and intended outcomes

  • Design measurable survey questions

  • Choose the question format that is most appropriate for what is being measured

  • Analyze responses for insights

We focus primarily on designing effective survey questions, but the principles can also be applied to interview and focus group design.

We explore how to translate summarized data from an online survey platform into usable metrics and how to interpret them. All participants will receive access to my Likert scale calculator that allows them to easily convert Likert scale percentages to average values.

Click the images above to preview a few excerpts from the Survey Concentration.


What You Won’t Learn

In this hands-on, design-oriented workshop, we won't have time for manual data analysis in Excel, and you don't need to know how to do it. I've designed this workshop to optimize the data analysis process with minimal technical knowledge. We also do not cover creating visualizations in PowerPoint or Excel, as these skills can be easily acquired through a quick video tutorial.

Resources Galore

This workshop is packed with sample questions, visualizations, sample files, and even a calculator! These resources are intended to serve as a source of guidance and inspiration for students as they incorporate these skills into their own practice.


Interested in this workshop?

If you are interested in hosting my workshop at your university, please reach out to me! I look forward to working together to inspire the next generation of designers.