Raw data points are just stars in the night sky: some are brighter, some are closely grouped, some are faint and worth ignoring.

We don’t have to visually process all the stars to make them useful to us. Navigators and seafarers identified constellations for that. Constellations are convenient ways to understand the existing clusters and relationships. They provide a convenient way of filtering out the noise, and of seeing relationships and of orienting ourselves to address the design problems that matter.

Just because every star has a name doesn’t mean designers or their clients have to understand it all. Designers need just enough research to justify their design priorities and develop an informed, even if incomplete, feature roadmap in time for new data points to emerge. Designers need to be fluent in the research enough to show, through their application of design and user experience principles, how the research translates into the design of a given product.

To researchers, your work might look like an end deliverable document, but to designers embracing lean UX however, we are the consumers of research and we ought to view research as an open conversation. The conversation begins with facts that were previously unorganized. As designers become fluent in the research, our iterative design process and lean UX principles enable us to stay open to new facts that can continue to emerge, and with them higher fidelity constellations.