“Fundamentally this is about people” – YouGov launches new Profiles tool

The interactive Profiles website is based on data collection in the YouGov “Cube” which the organisation says is a “connected data vault which holds over 120,000 data points, collected from over 200,000 UK YouGov members”.

Visitors to the YouGov Profiles website can type in a search term – YouGov says – “any brand, person or thing” – and be presented with an average “persona” of someone interested in that topic.

If you type in “design” for example you find that the average person interested in design is female, aged 25-39, and is likely to own a cat.

Click director Rob Calvert says the consultancy designed and built the site in just eight weeks.

Calvert says: “YouGov had a relatively clear vision for what they wanted to do with this. Fundamentally this is about people. The person is in the middle and the data is presented around them.”

As well as working on the user experience and build of the site, Click also created all the graphics for the different personas.

Calvert says: “There are 16 different characters and they are based on touchpoints of age, gender and social grade. It was quite challenged to create characters that clearly expressed these things.”

Click also developed the start screen, which Calvert describes as a “narrative”. This sees the data point the user inputs travel into the YouGov data “Cube” before the results are presented.

Calvert says: “The overall aim with this design was to create something clean and easy-to-use. The whole idea is that the user is slowly dragged into this world of data.”