How to Organize Qualitative Data

Discussing the challenges in organizing and analyzing of qualitative data, along with one of the ways to overcome such challenges.

In our design thinking process, we’re generally looking at two types of research data generated from the discovery phase. These two types include: qualitative and quantitative data.

Qualitative and quantitative data can also be further classified as behavioural and attitudinal, depending on whether we’re looking at our participants’ intended actions (behaviours) or at their thoughts and beliefs (attitudes).

As you can imagine, designers and researchers might have a harder time interpreting qualitative data in contrast with quantitative data. Qualitative attitudinal and qualitative behavioural data are especially a challenge when it comes to organization and analysis. This is because such information don’t always fit within defined statistical boundaries and insights can vary across participants’ perspectives.

In today’s article, we’ll be looking at one of the most effective ways of tackling sheer qualitative data when it comes to distilling important user information— thematic analysis.

Challenges of Qualitative Data

At the start of our design thinking process, we would generally find ourselves working on projects that might be more ambiguous in scope and direction in search for user problems. We can also think about the research during this discovery phase as generative, rather…