When it comes to creating or improving a product, it helps to receive the input of the people who are going to use it. This is where user experience, or UX, comes in.
With UX, product developers and businesses research the experiences of the individuals who make up the target audience of product users. To do this, a critical step involves one-on-one interviewing. Before understanding the data from interviews, researchers need to first figure out how to analyze it.
1. Set a Clear Goal
To really understand the results of your UX interviews, it helps to have a clear goal in mind at all times. When you cut out time to specifically dedicate to goal setting, it can make objectives more achievable. Otherwise, it can be easy to become side-tracked when inevitable other variables come into the picture.
2. Use a Discussion Guide for Interviews
Next, you do not want to forget to use a discussion guide for the interviews. As a guide that includes all of your research questions, it can provide you want the necessary organization to stay on track. There is nothing worse than an unprepared interviewer. Using a discussion guide can help you prevent that from happening.
3. Collect Notes
When interview participants begin answering questions, you need to have an efficient system in place for collecting notes. For many product developers, a user interview tool can help you make sense of your interview notes by allowing you to organize documents, videos, spreadsheets, and audio files in a clean and manageable way.
4. Look for Patterns Using Keywords
While making notes, researchers should also look for patterns using keywords. To most effectively do this, begin by coding your notes. Then, cluster your codes into themes to analyze. When observing the themes, what reoccurrences can you observe? Figuring this out manually can take a significant amount of time, but using a high-quality research tool can save you time.
5. Highlight Key Insights
After identifying patterns manually or with the assistance of research tools, the next thing to do is to highlight all of the key insights that your research has uncovered. What kinds of problems exist? What are the product strengths? Are there more logical ways to use the product that your team has previously considered?
6. Make Suggestions
Once you have an outline of your key insights, you have to reflect on your findings to come up with several suggestions. What kinds of things should change? Is there anything that needs to stay the same? How can the product be better than it currently is? These are the types of questions that you should think about when formulating suggestions.
7. Share Data With Stakeholders
Last, what good is all of this data and research if no one ever hears about it? Without a doubt, another major upside of conducting any type of UX research is that it offers an opportunity for conversation between stakeholders. In this way, user interviews help product makers set priorities and make better-informed decisions for the road map going forward
At the end of the day, analyzing interviews is one of the best ways to understand important insights from your target audience of product users. These seven tips can help.
