Making Sense of It All: Synthesizing Qualitative Data
Creating design artifacts from affinity diagrams to archetypes
Recap from the last post: We led successful co-design workshops with 55 high schoolers and came away with stacks of post-it notes and filled-out worksheets. Read on to see how we were able to make sense of it all!
This Week
We were now at a point where we conducted a lot of research from:
- Interviews with 12 students
- Journey Map worksheets from 55 students during co-design
- Experience Path diagrams from 8 student groups during co-design
- Interviews with 9 current employees
Our goal for this week was to synthesize our data into useable insights to inspire design concepts. We needed a way to understand all of this data from disparate sources and artifacts…but how? We decided to split off into smaller groups to tackle it all.
Tip for Project Managers
Optimize your team’s manpower by breaking off into smaller groups. Don’t force people do tasks they don’t want to do. Instead, find a compromise by finding other useful tasks for them to do at the same time.
Creating Design Artifacts
Affinity…again
With interviews from 12 students, we had students from a variety of backgrounds. Some were home-schooled or attended online school instead of traditional high school. Some knew exactly what they wanted to do for their career, while others were only starting to think about it.
Since we had so much information from just students, we decided that an affinity diagram was the most appropriate method to synthesize these interviews.
Through this exercise, we derived interesting insights from clustered quotes, here’s a small sample of them:
- Many different types of events can shape students’ interests: hands-on experiences, classes, and stumbling upon random events
- Students’ career interests are influenced by people they know
- Students don’t really use guidance counselors
- …but students expect guidance from school to help with their decisions
These insights are not intended to be earth-shattering new information. Rather, these insights make the interviewee’s perspectives and sentiments very explicit. Then these insights can be used to bounce design ideas off of or generate further research questions.
Archetypes
From our co-design session with 9th graders, we had 55 journey map worksheets from each student about their past influences, their current experiences, and their future plans and dreams.
As we were reading through the worksheets, we saw there were a couple trends: 1) how narrow or broad their career goals were and 2) how much effort they put in their past or current experiences to support this goal. This eventually lead to 5 different student archetypes laid out across a grid.
- Go-Getter: a student that has a specific career goal and is actively working towards their interests through their day-to-day activities.
- Dreamer: a student that can name specific career goals, but currently lacks the experience to understand or the drive to explore those goals.
- Explorer: a student that has put some effort into career exploration, but is drawn to multiple, different interests for their career field.
- Undecided: a student that has started to identify several potential career interests but doesn’t know what direction to go towards.
- Apathetic: a student that has not thought much about career planning and disengages in discussions when the topic is brought up.
Insights and Breakdowns
From our second co-design workshop, we had poster-sized diagrams where we asked students to work together to create a future plan for exploring careers.
Nathan and Jordan worked together to find patterns in the diagrams, such as what order they placed certain icons and which resources they chose to use.
From these, they derived several insights and breakdowns, for example:
- Most groups started with people before other sources of information, especially guidance counselors
- Social media was not used often, especially as a first step
- Most groups ended the process with exposure activities such as hands-on learning through internships and clubs
Meanwhile…
Our team had a very heavy focus getting the student’s perspective on how they see their career. But what about those who are already in the workforce? We wanted to look deeper into how current workers got to their current job/career after high school.
Employee Journeys
Radha and Alexis talked to 9 people between the ages of 25 to 45 across a variety of professions. During these interviews, they mapped out their life journey from high school to the present.
As you can see, they’re pretty crazy. We saw that people’s plans are changed by unexpected life events or different decisions they made in the past.
These interviews were then grouped into three types of journeys:
- People who know from the start: similar to our Go-Getter student archetype, these are people who had a strong interest spark in their past that lead to their current career
- People who find it after trial and error: those who tried many different paths or jobs before finding satisfaction in their current career
- People who haven’t found it yet: those who view their job with a more “work to live” mentality and find life satisfaction outside of their career, often people in this category faced many constraints that would not allow them to pursue a more meaningful career
What We Learned
Even though it sounds like a lot of work, we found it absolutely necessary to take the time to sift through our data to draw out the key insights and learning from them.
Qualitative data can be tricky. Interpretation can be subjective and it requires careful understanding in order to draw out patterns and insights. Different research methods may require different approaches to synthesis.Our team figured it out as we went in order to compile the data in a digestible way for the rest of the team to understand.
We found it important to do a thorough analysis to truly understand what we came out of all our research with. This gave us a solid foundation to then start creating design ideas.
This week we did a lot of reviewing and synthesizing our data to prepare us for the next phase of more research through design. Check out our next post to see how we used this data to create our initial ideas!
