Research Synthesis

User research is essential UX Design activity. It does not necessary mean, that only the dedicated researcher should perform the user research. Especially in an enterprise environment, it is often very difficult to get access to the users. Sometimes, the topic is so technical that the engineering architect might be a better fit to lead the research interview to establish a natural conversation with the user.

Everyone must have a similar understanding of the big picture to make informed decisions.

Regardless the form of the research, what makes the user research successful, is the research synthesis.

It doesn’t matter how much research you do if the people who have acquired the most knowledge write a report and move on - Erika Hall.

A critical failure of the research activity occurs, when the research synthesis report is not even crafted. The interviewer would submit rough meeting notes or meeting recording into the system and move on. The only insights used from these sessions remain to be interpreted anecdotes — often direct feature requests.

In this article, I want to share a collaborative story. I was not actively leading the research process, but I was providing the design guidance on research synthesis. The research topic was deeply technical and related to security and administration topics. In other words, quite boring topic that is receiving very little focus, but causes a lot of pain to the actual users.

The Form

The goal was to find a form that would be interesting enough to catch the attention of wide group of internal stakeholders. We knew in advance, that the topic is often disregarded as minor and as the product area with not enough direct business value.

Our goal was to pass the rough and direct emotion. We wanted to avoid making assumptions and clearly separate the data from the insights. We decided to use audio snippets as our main tool to pass the user voice.

The flow

The basic research flow was established around this structure:

1. We prepared objectives and interview questions.
2. We spoke to the users.
3. We took the notes and recorded the conversations.
4. We transcripted the audio recordings.
5. We synthesized individual headlines.
6. We found common patterns across the headlines and created the final report.

Tools

We used Google Forms to capture quantitative insights and a shared Google document to collaboratively transcript the interviews. We colour coded the individual headlines inside the document for later processing. Camtasia helped us with the audio snippets, and we used a simple Trello board to group the headlines under common patterns.

Interview transcript and colour coded headlines.

Trello board used to find common patterns across the interviews.

Research Report

The actual research report was divided into main sections that matched the common patterns we found across the interviews. Each section contained cards with short transcript and audio snippet link to the respective part of the interview.

Headline with original user quotes and audio snippets.

Conclusions

I often see, that it is not the lack of customer interaction that is resulting in poor design decision making. Off course, not every customer engagement activity is a user research.

But often the data and insights are not passed to the rest of the teams. When the results are not shared, it is also hard to improve on the actual research technique.

In a busy enterprise environment, everyone is constantly dragged into a number of activities. The form of the research synthesis is equally important to the content. Audio or video snippets are a great tool to pass the rough and un-edited emotion.

Most likely, people would never watch 1hr long recording if we will share the original outputs. But we were able to spot additional insights and patterns just by going through all of the recorded data again while creating the audio snippets.

"I hadn’t actually digested what users were telling us until I participated in the synthesis.”

This was not an attempt to formalize an ideal research synthesis flow. I just wanted to demonstrate, that to synthesize a few interviews is not a rocket science. It definitely takes time — this activity needs to be properly scheduled. But in exchange, these outputs can help us to make better design decisions informed by data.

The Alexandrian designer does not have the luxury of redefining the problem to suit their own taste, desires, or aesthetic vision. The Alexandrian designer synthesizes a fit for a given context. — Alan Cooper.