Qualitative researchis an essential element of understanding your audience. If you want to catch next gen trends early, the trick is to get your customer’s input before developing your next product.
These early thoughts are often disorganised and might extend to topics that are less useful to you.
How do you take qualitative research data and turn it into actionable insights for your next campaign, product design or rebrand?
In this article, we’llwalk you through the essential steps.
Understanding Affinity Diagramming
Affinity diagrammingis a complex term for a relatively simple process. There are four steps to converting qualitative user research into something your team leaders, shareholders and partners could easily digest:
- Extract and summarise data
- Find patterns across participants
- Create insights
- Organise insights into a presentable format
Let’s take a closerlook at these steps below:
Step 1: Extracting and Summarising Data
Your qualitative research might consist of many lines of text, voice recordings, interviews, video
footage and more. The first step to turning this into insights is to sit down and identify critical information in these materials. Next, write down any sentiments that stand out from the conversation and summarise the data presented on sticky notes.
Use one note for eachtakeaway - this way, they can be grouped and organised easily later.
Step 2: Find Patterns
Next, look at all theshort sentiments you noted and group similar information together. For example, you might group sentiments about the ease of use of your product and then further group positive and negative comments. Several research participants might have pointed out the same feature or pain points.
Identify themes tocreate a sense of order.
- Convert Notes into Insights
By organising your shortened notes, you’ll already see themes arising. These will be your insights. The next step is to find how data relates to each other and what meaning this presents. Then, rearrange your notes again into themes of insights. In some cases, it might help to write a user need statement for each theme: This expresses, in short, what needs the user defined through their feedback.
- Organise Insights into a Presentable Format
Finally, it’s time topresent your insights in a way your teams and partners can easily understand. This means visualising your data in graphs, pie charts, user personas and more. Depending on your information, specific visualisations lend themselves to then project more than others. For example, in many cases, once you've converted qualitative data into insights, you can count how often a sentiment was mentioned in a specific participant group and present numeric data for easier understanding.
What Do You Need to Identify Trends from Qualitative Research?
The steps discussed inthis article enable user researchers to turn often chaotic qualitative research into valuable insights. But whilst the principles behind this process might seem simple, it’s far from easy in practice. Researchers need to combine the user data with their own knowledge and understanding to make data insights happen.
They need to understand their users’ behaviour, connect dots, empathise with how users feel and think, and persistently look at and analyse the same data several times.
If you’re unsure howto succeed at this process, why not rely on the help of expert user researchers? This Is Selfhood is an insights platform specialising in finding next-generation trends through a thriving community of U-30 consumers. We turn conversations into insights and can help your brand analyse user sentiment.
