Analysing user research insight

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking a lot about analysing user research insight recently. Mainly because I’ve been doing a lot of it. I’ve also been helping the lovely people at Q Community organise all the insight we’ve surfaced over the last 12 months of working together.

I’ve been thinking about doing Snook’s analysing user research course. Not because I don’t know how to do it but because it’s one of those aspects of design that I think we should always be pushing ourselves in. It’s also one of those things that’s often shrouded in mystery. The particularly annoying consultants sometimes even call it ‘magic’ which makes my blood boil slightly as I’m no Harry Potter.  

So with all this in mind I wanted to build on a LinkedIn post I did a while back that briefly summarised one of the methods I use for analysis. This is a method you can use to analyse user research interviews.

It has no name as such but back in my days of Snook my lovely colleagues christened the output ‘The Spreadsheet of Dreams’.

1. People take notes in user research interviews in lots of different ways but I find having one Word document per participant the easiest approach. You can also get transcripts if appropriate. This is what I review when looking for insights.

2. The first thing to do is to set up an excel to house the insights and quotes you’ll be copying and pasting from your notes documents. I like to make three sheets to start with:

   1. Insights

   2. Quotes

   3. Themes

3. In the first two sheets I make a column per participant. I label each column with a
   participant number and assign a colour code to that column as a highlight colour.

4. I then review each of the notes documents, pulling out insights and quotes that support my research aims. It’s important to remember here the true definition of an insight: the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something. In my opinion, great user researchers are the ones who can derive that deeper level of understanding from research, not just skim the surface. 

5. I add these insights and quotes into the respective sheets and corresponding column, colour coding as I go. I do this for every participant until I have a full set of quotes and insights.

6. I then move into the themes spreadsheet. I go through each participant and copy and paste the insights and quotes into the themes sheet, grouping as I go. When I start to see a theme I give a column a name. By colour coding in the first place you can track back to where the insight came from. You can also easily spot which themes are the biggest. 

This process is probably easier to understand with visuals so I’ve included a few screenshots from some analysis I did with the lovely Paws and Pause last year. I have blurred the text for confidentiality reasons but hopefully you can get the jist.

I’d be interested to hear from you if you’ve tried this approach. Equally keen to hear what your favourite method for analysis is.