Make sense of your customer discovery efforts through synthesis
You’re deep in problem-solving mode and need to get on the ground and do some research. It’s time for customer discovery. We’ve all been there. When you’re handling large amounts of qualitative research you collected during the customer discovery phase, it can be overwhelming to uncover valuable insights and contextualize them to your team. User Researchers take this on and do it incredibly well, but what happens when your team doesn’t have the resources to bring on talented researchers to do this? Here are some ways to simplify the process of converting your user studies into insights, so your team can confidently understand your users. And in turn, make the right product decisions to drive more growth for your business.
What is synthesis?
As a startup founder, product manager, or generalist designer, conducting research might not come to you naturally; more so, you might not know where to start. Yet, you know the value of conducting it. The key here is the synthesis process. If you take the time to do this correctly, you’ll save yourself a lot of effort, resourcing, and cost in the future. And when you are finally ready to bring that rockstar researcher onto the team, they’ll be pleasantly surprised at the solid foundation you’ve built for them.
Let’s say you’re tasked with solving a particular problem. To learn more about it, you need to interview users and stakeholders. Synthesis would be the next step in getting to the right solution and can be done in four steps:
- Note-taking
- Affinity Mapping
- Insight Generation
- Contextualizing
Note-taking
At this point, your data from user interviews is unstructured and it might be in the form of jotted notes or video and audio transcriptions. You will want to take this information and structure it in a way that starts to tease out the important pieces of what any given user discussed in your interviews.* You can do this by marking your text up, taking 1–2 key sentences and adding them to your sticky notes. Using different colors for your sticky notes can also help color code the information to keep you organized. These various ways of customizing your data is really up to you and how detailed you’d like to get.
The key to this part of the process is recognizing the most important patterns emerging from this information. And there are a few ways to track these.
- Indirect Observations — feelings, voice and tone might be jotted down here to convey frustration, joy, and other emotions towards a particular thought a user might have brought up
- Direct Quotes — word for word sentences that come directly from the source
- Interpretations — an inkling of an undertone or implied meaning behind something your user stated
*Note: there is nuance to this and researchers are the experts in this process. For non researchers, Pensieve provides free templates used by world-class ux researchers so that you can conduct your interviews properly.
Affinity Mapping
In a pre-pandemic world, you would have typically taken your newly created sticky notes and plastered them all over your wall or whiteboard to review with your team mates. However, in a world where more teams are going fully remote, we want to bring this process into a web app.
The key to this part of the process is to bucket your sticky notes into emerging themes. If certain sticky notes seem to go well together, you can create a bucket or grouping. Once you’ve bucketed all the notes, it’s time to create labels for each bucket. If you find that some of your sticky notes don’t really fit into any of your buckets, you can leave them as outliers or you can discard them if you aren’t finding them to be as high of a priority to address at this time.
Insight Generation
You’re now ready to analyze each bucket to understand exactly what sort of needs, goals, pain points are emerging from your qualitative research. You can convert these into generalized insight statements to capture the overall insight each of the buckets represent.
“I’m really frustrated that x isn’t happening when I do y”
“It’s so expensive to do z, so I end up having to do a,b,c, and d”
“I spend so much time doing a, when I really want to do b”
Contextualize
This is the step where you will share with your team and stakeholders. From here, it’s up to you and your team to either go down two paths, which will depend on your time constraints. If you, like many startup founders, generalist designers, and product managers who work at high growth startups, don’t have a lot of time and you’re managing multiple projects, your path will be different from traditional research because you need to act quickly.
As a team, you will have to decide which insight should be prioritized by your team by voting and aligning on each insight. You can then prioritize them and move on to the next step of designing solutions for particular insights, and continue iterating, testing, and developing as you normally would.
Why is it important?
If it isn’t obvious already, conducting this process empowers your team to confidently build out the right solutions. By listening to your users early on in your development process, you’ll have a strong backbone to justify your product decisions.
For product managers, this is great because you can always reference your insights when development times aren’t as predictable as you’d like, and help motivate your team to really understand the WHY behind what they’re building.
As a designer, you’ll be advocating for your users by designing solutions that address exactly what their frustrations, pain points, goals and motivations are, instead of designing a pretty interface that doesn’t provide much value.
And as a startup founder, by understanding your users during the early stages of forming your business, you get to stay ahead of your competition, validate your idea, and bring long term value to your customers, investors, and team by building meaningful solutions for your community.
What should I do next?
Synthesis is a fun, integral process in the software development lifecycle. And more importantly, it puts customer empathy at the core of your business. Our tool offers an easy way to synthesize your data. We want anyone, regardless of whether you know how to conduct user research or now trying to learn what user research is, to make sure you have the confidence you need in what you’re delivering to the world.
Try Pensieve today and let us be the backbone of your customer discovery or user research process.
