Synthesising 7 different types of research

Synthesising research as we go. Planning more research based on the synth. Putting it all into a big synth pot for later.

Photo by Adams Arslan on Unsplash

Seven types of Service Recipes research feels like a lot to synthesise. So I’m not trying to do it all this week.

But it has been my main focus. It feels both overwhelming and exciting.

Overwhelming because we are at that messy stage of the research where there is a lot of data and we haven’t surfaced all the insights or connected them all together yet. It’ll likely all end up in a big ‘synth pot’ in early December.

Exciting because the learning will help us work out what to improve first, and the stretch will be good experience for the future

The research

We’ve got 7 types of research data to synthesise

1. Analytics — mainly to guide questions rather than insights
2. Tags and patterns research — understanding how tags and patterns are used on the site and in other places on the web. Our insight statements from this will guide user testing on tags and patterns.
3. Comparison — comparing the product with others will generate ideas that we can introduce later on in the process
4. Heuristic evaluation — we’ve commissioned two of these — one UX and one content design. The insights will inform our testing focus areas.
5. Recipe content crits — we’ve reviewed 10 recipes using content design best practice. Some insights will inform testing while others will go into the big synth pot

6. User interviews — we haven’t done these yet. Planned for Nov 28–30th.

7. User testing — we’ve not done this yet. Planned for Nov 28–30th.

The value of synthesizing research

I see two main values to synthesizing your research.

1. Value in the process. As a team you internalise hundreds of pieces of data and grow your empathy for your users. This is what I see happening anyway.
2. Value in the outputs. The insight statements we produce will help us and others who join the design effort to make good decisions.

How I synth

I don’t think there is one right way to synth, but I do think you need a strcutured process to make you think in a disciplined way. Here’s how I do it.

1. Gather all the data from a type of research into post it notes
2. sort those post it notes into clusters. Label each cluster as we go.
3. Sort those clusters into sub-clusters. Label each sub-cluster.
4. Write statements about each sub-cluster or collection of similar/aligned sub-clusters

I don’t usually synth on my own. Its better to have at least one other designer/researcher or stakeholder taking equal responsibility.

What I’m doing next

We’ve 10 days until user interviews and testing. I’m reviewing the statements and identifying those that are more assumptions / less validated. Those that are assumptions will get tested. Those that are already validated will go into the synth pot for early December. By then I hope we have 40–50 actionable insights. We’ll probably cluster them thematically, write some meta-insights, then consider the classic design question ‘How might we….’

Once we’re done I expect there will still be some fuzziness and more questions unanswered but we will be able to make some decisions about what to prioritise for design and development in January-March.