Make the most of your user research and synthesize like a pro
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User research is like the ingredients in a sauce. If you start with bad ingredients, there’s only so much salt, sugar or seasoning you can add to cover things up and salvage your sauce. If you skimp on user research, you may never be able to salvage your project. (For a deep dive into user research, check out this article.)
But the research is just one step. Usually after conducting user research there’s a feeling of overwhelm. Now what? You have all this great information, but how do you begin to make sense of it? Never fear. Follow these simple tactics below to make the most of your hard earned ingredients.
Note: These tactics are in a logical order that could be used on your project. I’ve worked in this order many times. But every project is different and you may need to customize.
Empathy map
Empathy maps are a temporary container for the insights you have gathered in your user research. They look like this.
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Usually empathy maps will include different sections that represent what user says and does, thinks and feels, sees and hears. The section names you choose don’t matter all that much. The most important thing is to do this activity quickly, and without thinking too hard about what goes where. It’s just a tool to get the insights out of your mind and onto something you can work with. The information will only be in this format temporarily.
Pro tip: Save time by capturing insights from user interviews directly into an empathy map rather than writing down notes that need to be organized again in order to get them into something like an empathy map.
As soon as you are done with your empathy map I recommend an affinity mapping exercise where you start to organize the information into similar groupings to see what themes emerge from your research.
Affinity map
After you have unpacked your insights into an empathy map you’re going to want to transfer those to an affinity map.
An affinity map is nothing more than a tool to organize your insights into into similar groupings so themes bubble up to the surface. The rules of affinity mapping are simple.
- Do it silently
- Everyone can move anything anywhere at any time
- Use a time limit
I also recommend allowing the categories to form naturally and to name them near the end as opposed to creating categories first. It looks like this.
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Create a journey map
If you are exploring an experience that is relatively linear, like entering a store > browsing > checking out, a journey map may be the way to go. Similar to empathy maps and affinity maps, journey maps help teams capture the insights about an experience in a way that highlights the pain points and areas of opportunity.
The main difference is that a journey map is more effective at seeing pain points at a specific touchpoint within a series of touchpoints. The empathy map/affinity map combo will help you find the pain points, but won’t look at experiences in chronological order.
Journey maps also take a before an after form. The “before” will show how things are and the “after” may show how you hope things to be after improvements. Common techniques for journey maps include noting which experiences are positive neutral or negative which can be noted in the way the journey map is laid out or with emoticons. They may look like this.
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Or like this.
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Journey maps often include quotes at different touch points to help put a bit of context around the touchpoint that is being represented.
One pitfall associated with journey maps, which is also true for other synthesis techniques, is that teams will create these documents and then wait or even worse, stop working. They may be waiting to schedule a review meeting with other team members, their leaders, a client. This waiting is really detrimental to the momentum of a project. It is far more effective to go immediately into ideation as soon as you have completed a journey map. This is because at that point you will be very close to the information and you’ll have a good idea of where the pain points exist. You are primed to generate solutions.
However you generate them, like many of the other techniques, journey maps are a tool to provide focus. They should never be the deliverable, but instead a way to get you ready to generate ideas.
Use a silent vote
Regardless of which tactics you use to synthesize, you are sure to discover multiple problems in your research. You can’t solve them all. You need to make a decision on which problem area to focus on or you run the risk of solving nothing. This is difficult, but worth it. Even if all team members participated in the user research rounds, they may not agree on which problems to focus on. Push through this potential blocker by voting silently. You can do this in a few ways. If you are in person, write the problems down on post it notes and organize them on a wall into similar groupings. Then use sticky dots to vote. Give every team member 3 votes. DO NOT DISCUSS, no matter how badly you want to. Let everyone vote silently and pick the problem with the most votes. If you are a distributed team and work remotely, you are in luck. This activity works far better in a remote setting where anonymity is easier. In fact, even if you are co-located, I recommend doing this in a remote way, even if that means sending everyone to their desks that may be feet from each other. Also, there’s no real upside to ever revealing who voted for what, and anonymity makes it easier to never reveal that. Never knowing whose idea is whose or who voted for what enforces collective ownership of the idea. Disagree and commit!
Alternative: If there is a clear decision maker or one person who will be held accountable for the decision, it’s OK to give that person a “super vote”, which could be in the form of tie-breaking power, extra votes or the option to override the team’s decision. No matter how you do it, it’s still important to have the team vote because it gives the decision maker valuable input for their decision. If you are the decision maker, make it clear to your team that you are prepared to be held accountable for the decisions or else the team may be risk averse and stay away from anything other than the safe choice.
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Pro tip: Voting criteria can make a huge difference here. Instead of having team members vote for the “most important” or “most urgent” problem, have them vote for the “most interesting”. Here’s why. People like to work on interesting things. And when the project gets tough and motivation is waning, an interesting problem will help people push through.
Once you have narrowed down to the problem or problems you want to focus on, you can use some of the following tools to help define your focus.
Create personas
Be warned. Personas are often misused. When the are used incorrectly, they can do more harm to a project than good. For a full breakdown on personas, see this article. For the highlights on personas, read on! Personas must always be research-based. If you’ve done your research you are in a great position to create personas that represent the users whose experience you are trying to impact.
The most important thing to remember is that a persona is a tool for focus. It allows your team to focus on who they are designing for and why. Avoid the temptation to merge everything into a few catch all personas. This isn’t helpful. Instead, allow your personas to reflect specific needs. Team members and stakeholders will come up with ideas that sound really interesting but a persona helps ground the team in who they’re solving for so they can quickly determine if a cool sounding idea is really worth pursuing.
Personas should always include a few things:
- a photo
- a descriptive name
- a representative quote
- the behaviors, attitudes, pain points, beliefs and goals of that persona
Limit your team to 2–3 personas. If you try to solve for everyone, you probably solve for no one. It looks like this.
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Make a problem statement
Problem statements achieve a similar outcome to persons — focus. They help ensure alignment and focus around a problem. It’s your true north. Generally, they follow this format.
“[persona name] needs a way to [persona’s need] because [your insight about why your persona has that need].
Here’s an example:
“Concerned Cary needs a way to know which research synthesis techniques may work best because she is worried her team may not be able to identify the right problem when reviewing all the amazing user research they have done.”
Rather than discussing, have each team member write one and then silently vote on the one that conveys the problem the most succinctly.
Question storm!
If you have done all or many of the above, you are probably primed to start coming up with possible solutions that are directly mapped to your problem statement, the needs of your persona or the moment in your journey map. Do this one last step to catapult your team into solutionville. Turn your problem into a question. It will further ensure that you and your team are focused on the problem because your solution ideas will simply be answers to a question. Here’s an example:
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The format “HMW”, which stands for How Might We is very intentional. It fosters collective ownership of the problem and it doesn’t assume a solution, so there is plenty of room to generate all kinds of ideas.
Good luck! And stay tuned for part 3 of this series, which will focus on the next steps are generating ideas and prototyping!
Part 1: What’s the worst that could happen? Reducing risk through user research