I think it's a bit of a gimmick and waste of time myself. On the 2wd anyhow!
Not sure how much difference the snow setting etc makes to the 4wd.
Have driven around switching back and fore between the modes at traffic lights, and can see no real discernable advantage to being able to change between them.
All eco seems to do is force on the stop/start and restrict AC.
Normal seems, well normal, and sport seems no different to normal to me, other than the steering feels slightly heavier, I didn't like it, and spend most of the time in normal.
On my mates Zafira he has a sport button on the dash, and it is actually is mapped differently, and gives about 40bhp extra when in sport mode. Sport on the Ateca seems to do very little.
It's all a bit vague all round really, the three settings are just described as eco, normal, sport, but when you go into each one, it just says steering, throttle etc all the same, eco, normal, or sport, with no real description of the actual differences between each setting..
In 'individual' you can just change the AC, throttle, steering etc between eco, normal or sport manually, i.e. In normal all three say 'normal', in sport all three say 'sport', in individual you can have steering as normal and throttle as sport, etc,..