How to Make Sense of Research in a Digital Space
Many teams talk about that “a-ha” moment that comes after a user research study, when everyone is gathered in the same room around a whiteboard with Post-its, Sharpies and stickers. It’s often recommended that you establish a war room for your study to keep everything organized and focused.
So what do you do when you’re working with a remote team without the luxury of being in the same room?
Being able to gather around the whiteboard is great. However, more and more companies are finding themselves with remote employees, and now need to figure out how to work with their remote teams. According to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Labor, 23% of full-time employees do some amount of work from home. Upwork also released a report claiming that “over a third of full-time employees will work remotely in the next ten years.”
At InVision, I work with a team of 700+ remote workers, leading the user research practice.
Contrary to what you might have heard, it’s totally possible to set yourself (and your remote team) up to successfully distill your research findings and identify complex patterns, learnings, and insights. In this article, we’ll dive in to a few different methods for remote research analysis and synthesis.
Why do war rooms work?
Before we dive into remote research synthesis, it’s good to understand what makes the “war room” so popular and effective.
Collaboration with the entire team
Everyone gathers in the war room: product managers, engineers, designers, and even executives to discuss the project. This keeps the entire team and stakeholders aligned and focussed.
Focus on the project
War rooms create a focused space for the team to gather for discussion, ideation, planning and research synthesis. The walls become insights, sketches and posters so you’re always focused on the project at hand.
Creative freedom
What’s a war room without whiteboards? It’s easy to set up a war room that works for the team by moving furniture, bringing in supplies and roughing out quick sketches, flows and ideas.
Information is accessible
When your user research findings are all over the walls in Post-it or poster form, they’re accessible to everyone at the company who wants to walk in and check it out.
It’s fun
Let’s be real — war rooms also work because they’re fun. They create an engaging, creative and colorful environment to work with your team. There’s no doubt that war rooms inspire creativity and passion.
How to make sense of insights remotely
Okay, so now we know why physical war rooms work. How can we get these same benefits when working remote? As it turns out, it’s totally possible!
1. Keep an updated, living document to make information accessible
Welcome to your digital war room. This living document is your new poster wall.
Start a living document for your research plan that outlines your goals, questions and current progress. Pin it to your Slack channel, include it in your status reports, and keep it ready in your clipboard. Update your living research plan with dates, insights and links to relevant resources every day.
2. Summarize findings after every participant conversation or session
This is a super popular practice recommended by user research champions like Michael Margolis and the GV team. I absolutely support this recommendation, as it’s an imperative step to get through the study synthesis efficiently.
I typically use Zoom to run my remote research sessions and will wrap up each session with a debrief. The debrief only needs to take 10–15 minutes with the core team. The output of each debrief is a fleshed out “findings” and action items list from each individual session. The team quickly discusses what was learned, new insights, open questions, and any adjustments we’d like to make to the research plan.
This is then easily shareable with any relevant teams as research is conducted. Quick findings are documented immediately and can be socialized across the product and design team using Slack.
3. Track findings from multiple sessions using Airtable
Rather than doing an enormous amount of synthesis at the end of a research sprint, start collecting your insights for multiple sessions in a spreadsheet or document to make theme-hunting easier. I like using Airtable or Freehand by InVision to start capturing high-level questions, themes that are beginning to surface and hypotheses I have in the works.
Typically, I will use Airtable for larger, more generative or exploratory studies. I will start by entering anything I feel is relevant as a “theme,” with no exact method to my madness. Usually, I add these themes during the debrief as I chat with the team. Anyone who participated in the interview or watched the recording is also encouraged to add themes, either over a group call or individually on each team member’s own time. I recommend getting started with Airtable’s User Insights base and adjusting with your own additional tables/columns as-needed.
Using Airtable, I create a Themes table which keeps track of theme numbers for me. As you do this with two or more sessions, you’ll start to see themes emerging. I can then consolidate alike themes (duplicates may happen when this is maintained by the team, but that’s totally okay!), categorize them, and determine which themes are insights (or nuggets). This allows you to diverge, and look at insights at a higher level to start connecting dots, and also dig deep on individual sessions as needed. I feel this is my take on the classic rainbow spreadsheet.
You can add as many columns as you need during each study, and analysis to explore different avenues, which makes me a fan of using Airtable to do this. If you’re working with data, the data team can add additional columns to flesh out themes or sessions with any relevant analytics.
Personally, I like to use a different Airtable base for each product’s studies. This allows me to add analytics relevant to each team, and have a bit more freedom during the synthesis phase. I can add survey results, behavior metrics, create a bunch of tables, and views for those teams… Some teams like to keep all of their insights in one base, which is a great way to keep absolutely all of your insights and themes in one place.
4. Create a digital whiteboard for enhanced collaboration
Digital whiteboards can be used for team exercises like mapping out user journeys, JTBD timelines, storyboards and more. This can make synthesis calls more fun and interactive with your remote team.
I like to use InVision Freehand for these types of exercises, to mimic a physical whiteboard. Freehand is also a great place to have your debrief conversations, as you can easily draw out notecards, move them around, and really just creatively explore any ideas.
You can use Freehand to identify themes with card-sorting exercises (similar to using Post-its), using checks or circles to vote or track mentions and adding imagery. Freehand really checks that “creative freedom” box because of its versatility, and the fact that entire teams can get involved with drawing out workflows and ideas. Tables are great, but visualizing the journey can really help you identify gaps and new opportunities.
5. Tie it all together in your living research plan
Now what? Each interview session has notes and findings, and your team has gone through synthesis using Airtable and drawn out a user journey in Freehand. How do you tie it all together? Back to the research plan!
So far you’ve been keeping your research plan totally up-to-date with all of your sessions. Set up a team meeting to review everything and make your last edits to the research plan. This “last meeting” should include the entire team who benefits from this research if possible. Everyone who has been involved in the interviews or watched recordings can participate, and others can ask questions and learn.
From my experience, people shy away from massive research reports. I’ve tackled this by turning to a simple bulleted list of learnings and recommendations. It’s an extremely approachable method of delivery, and ultimately, people just want to know what was learned. If folks want to dig deeper, all spreadsheets, surveys and analyses are linked to.
In conclusion
When your user research study is complete and you’re moving on to your next project, the war room needs all of the posters, sticky notes and whiteboards cleaned up.
What I love most about making this user research synthesis process digital for remote workers is that there’s a record of all the research you’ve done.
It’s all tracked in a lovely document which connects all the exploration, interview sessions and answers to the team’s questions
At the end of the day, there are a ton of versatile tools and methods out there to distill user research findings with a remote team. This article is where I’ve landed so far. I’m always looking to make this better and I’d love to hear what works for you.
What remote synthesis methods have worked for you and your team?
If you enjoyed this article, feel free to clap 👏 to help others find it.
To learn more about UX research, join our community of over 4700 UX researchers in the Mixed Methods Slack group. 💬
Prefer to listen in? Check out our podcast! 🎧
