Tips and tricks on remote synthesis. Art inspired by Nimura Daisuke

Exploratory research: part 3: making sense of the data captured

In part 3, we’ve done our interviews and have a good pool of data collected. This article is aimed at sharing what benefited me during the synthesis process and I hope it can help some of you folks too.

Synthesis

We have just finished the interviews. Now here’s your pile of quotes. Synthesis is really about coming together to cluster the quotes, organise and find patterns. Collaboration helps pull researchers out of their own conclusions and see the research in totality, re-org if required. This is why in part 2, I mentioned that document to almost a transcribed version of the interview is so important.

Remote collaboration: tools

There have been a few new tools introduced over the years. You can easily do this on Figjam, Miro or Mural. Our team used Mural for this project, while it has great functions like a timer for timeboxing, we found it to be fairly laggy as our synthesis evolved with discussions and ideation placed on the same board. We ended up using multiple boards as a workaround.

Assign a colour to each participant

Migrate verbatim to the board, with each dedicated to a virtual Post-it. Assigning a colour to a participant will help you identify quickly who said what, it can also help you see a pattern if certain participants of certain criteria behave the same way.

It’s meant to be messy

Yes it’s really about organising them along the way! At first it will look like a POST-IT monster vomited all over the virtual board but eventually as we start to make sense and identify patterns and insights it wouldn’t look too scary.

An example of a pattern uncovered with quotes from different participants

End result of our synthesis exercise. (image pixelated for confidentiality purposes)

Now that we have our patterns and insights, “How might we(HMW)”….

Bringing back to the part 1 on the team’s goal:

We want to study the human experience of financial inclusion/exclusion, focusing in on the lives of the unbanked and underbanked of the working poor in Thailand and Indonesia during this pandemic, to ensure continued engagement in the financial system.

Having the patterns/themes and insights from the synthesis above will help us to rephase into “How might we” potential problem statements. Approaching from this angel helps to further lead to ideation brainstorming sessions, because a solution thought of at the moment may

1. May not always be the best. (we are not the subject matter experts, so solutions proposed may have other factors not known of(e.g legal constraint)
2. Hinder innnovative ideas from sprouting when sharing with the intended audience (known as anchoring bias)
3. Not currently in clients’ roadmap, then your solution then runs into the risk of becoming outdated.

The whitepaper has been released, feel free have a read!

The only constant is change

Yes, technology changes and environments change. But human behaviour doesn’t change as fast as the next iPhone release. As Jeff Bezos once mentioned: “ it is easier and cheaper to create the future than to try and predict it”. Exploratory research is can be valuable and can help organisations find their next innovative product instead of jumping onto bandwagons one after the other.

Thank you for taking time to read through my reflection on this chaotic yet fun process called exploratory research. I hope that you will get a chance to participate in such a project and be part of a team that was just as aligned, thoughtful and readily open to learning during your career. Should you have any more queries or doubts, feel free to comment down below and I will do my best to help. Cheers!