Chapter 4
User interview analysis: How to turn data into decisions
It’s the moment your UX team has been waiting for. You’ve conducted a series of user interviews that dove into the problems and priorities of your users—now it’s time to dissect the qualitative data and turn it into decision-driving insights.
Keep reading for our chapter on all-things user interviews analysis, where we’ll cover key steps to analyze your user interviews, best practices to center your process around, and what’s next after you extract these insights.
How to analyze user interviews: Step-by-step
When we talk about analyzing user interviews, more often than not we’re talking about some form of thematic analysis. This method of qualitative research analysis helps you identify themes and patterns in user interview data that you can then use to inform product decisions and build user-centered features, products, and experiences.
Thematic analysis can be as complex as you want it to be. You can closely follow all six of these steps, or loosely convert your data to themes and insights.
At its least intensive level, thematic analysis looks like skim-reading your data and taking note of recurring themes and thoughts. On a deeper scale, you focus in and meticulously assign codes to each relevant piece of feedback—this enables you to truly understand the themes across your data and their relevance to the overall research study.
Thematic analysis can be done manually, as we explain below, or can be done with the assistance of a user interview analysis tool. Both are productive in terms of gleaning valuable insights, but one’s a lot quicker than the other (no prizes for guessing which).
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1. Revisit your user research goals
Effective analysis requires you to never lose sight of your original user research plan and goals. By touching base with what you set out to achieve by conducting user interviews, you’re priming yourself to look for relevant patterns, themes, and insights.
These research objectives should act as your north star throughout the interview process, and analysis is no different. Once you’re clear on what you’re aiming for, you’re ready to dive into your dataset.
2. Transcribe your interviews and organize the scripts
To analyze your data, you need to convert it to written word. After your user interviews, you’ll likely have hours of audio and/or video recordings.
You can transcribe this manually, by listening to the recording and typing out the responses, or automatically, by using a transcription tool like Maze Interview Studies or a transcription-only tool.
💡 Pro tip
You’ll be using this transcription to look for common themes and patterns between respondents, so don’t leave anything out—even if you think it’s not useful in the moment!
You’ll want to organize your scripts for easy access, helping you cross-reference participants and their answers. There are two ways to do this:
- Create a script or document for each interviewee: This method makes it easy to cross-reference your answers between individuals
- Make a separate document for each question: This method makes it easier to identify patterns and themes
Once you have your user interview scripts, it’s time to perform the actual interview analysis.
3. Read through your data and assign relevant codes
Begin thematic analysis of user interviews by familiarizing yourself with the data and reading through participant responses multiple times.
Thematic grouping is the best, but it takes time. You have to read everything closely, seeing through the responses and parsing them for deep meaning.
Scott Hurff, CPO and Co-Founder at Churnkey
Note any responses with terms or phrases relevant to your UX research goals. You’ll want to return to these notes later, so mark them down by assigning a code.
A code should summarize your point of interest in a few words. Let’s say you run into the following response:
“I have trouble navigating my profile. There are too many options. The worst part is going through them all, I can’t find a search bar anywhere.”
A good code for the first bolded phrase would be: ‘navigation issues’, while the second code could be ‘overwhelming profile features’. The third code could read: ‘search function findability’.
Your assigned codes will be the basis for further organizing your data into themes, and usable insights.
When looking through your user interview scripts, also consider any notes you or a colleague took during the interview, as this can help get deeper insights. Scott Hurff, CPO and Co-Founder at Churnkey, suggests asking yourself:
- “How did users speak?
- “What words did they use?
- “Did certain phrases keep appearing?
- “Were they frustrated, happy, content, timid?”
User interview notes can support your analysis, so keep them close to hand throughout the process.
4. Sort codes into overarching themes
While reading through your data and assigning codes, you’ll notice relevant patterns, sentiments, and themes starting to emerge. Once you’ve sifted through all your responses, note down your codes on a different document and group them into overarching themes.
Scott explains his approach to this step:
“Once common themes begin to emerge, I like to group them in a spreadsheet and chart them to get a sense of volume. What themes emerge the most? Which type of customer is experiencing this (for example, small businesses vs. indie hackers vs. mid-market businesses)?”
Your chosen theme names should label each code’s subject matter, making it easy to find relevant insights and points of interest. Theme examples could include:
- Profile features
- Navigation issues
- Billing and payment
- Search function findability
If you’re conducting thematic analysis manually, try sorting codes into temporarily flexible themes using a whiteboard or sticky notes. This makes it easy to move themes and codes around until you find a place that fits each best. Expect to move things around as you assign codes and more themes emerge.
Once your data is distilled into broad, overarching themes, your insights are ready for the taking.
5. Identify recurring ideas and highlight crucial information
At this stage in the thematic analysis process, you’ll start to uncover customer insights directly connected to your user research goals. Look over the reocurring codes that appear across a single theme to find out what’s most pressing for users.
If many users are stating they “can’t find the search bar” under the ‘search function findability’ theme, and your UX research goal is to improve navigation—you’ve just found an actionable insight.
Highlight responses from recurring codes, and keep on combing the rest of your themes for similar ideas or codes to uncover relevant pain points, usability issues, or particular product impressions and sentiments.
This is also when you might find it beneficial to restructure the themes that have emerged. Don’t be afraid to regroup and divide your themes into a new order—it’s easy to miss connections when first identifying themes, or to identify better structuring and theming opportunities for codes as your analysis evolves. Take another look over your themes to find the best way to organize them.
Once you’ve defined your high-level themes, you can use them to inform the next stage of the UX design and development process. The specifics depend on your goal, but use the themes you’ve identified alongside other forms of UX research to outline a path toward your desired outcome.
💡 Looking for a tool to simplify the process of identifying themes in user interview data? We’re covering the best user interview tools in the next chapter, including Maze Interview Studies—purpose-built for getting insights from interview data.
6. Create a report and prioritize insights based on UX research goals
The final step in analyzing user interview data is to share your findings. You’ll want to create a UX research report for key stakeholders—such as your team, other departments, and higher-ups—to aid alignment for actioning your insight-informed plan.
A report will do two things:
- Clearly communicate what you’ve accomplished to stakeholders, grab their attention, and get them on board with proposed solutions.
- Ensure everyone in your organization is on the same page. When it’s time to start making design changes, your team will know exactly what to do.
Some of the key components to include in your UX report are:
- The summary: Your summary should briefly explain your research goals, methodology, and key themes. Doing so makes it easy for stakeholders to understand the purpose of your projects and how your findings are relevant. Your summary should be an overview to set the scene before diving into specifics.
- The methodology: This is where you go into the details of how you approached your UX research. This section of the report should also serve as reference if other members of your team need to conduct user interviews again.
- The next steps: With your newly-found insights, you’re in a position to describe effective solutions. Note down recommendations connected to your goals ranging from new product updates, features, and information architecture reworks.
How to present user interview analysis to stakeholders
A key part of the UX research process is sharing insights with your team. It’s critical that stakeholders know the outcome of your research if you want to evangelize research and improve stakeholder buy-in.
Begin by laying out your research goals and demonstrating the connections to wider business objectives. Just like in your report, you should be speaking straight to stakeholders' pain points, hinting at how your user experience research will solve business problems. Tell them what you did and why you did it.
The next step of your presentation is to follow-up with key findings and atomic research nuggets. Created by Tomer Sharon and Daniel Pidcock, these digestible conclusions succinctly communicate exactly what you’ve done and the results you’ve reached while aligning them with product development. Sprinkling in atomic research nuggets also ensures that important results stay at the forefront of stakeholder’s minds.
Make sure to walk stakeholders through each step of your research process in a way that highlights how you got from start to finish. For example:
- Experiments: “We did this…”
- Facts: “…and we found out this…”
- Insights: “…which makes us think this…”
- Conclusions: “…so we’ll do this.”
Consider creating a UX research case study with strong storytelling tactics and a memorable narrative. This provides ample context for stakeholders, making it easy to thoroughly digest what challenge you faced, how you dug deeper with UX research, and the insights you uncovered.
Hillary Omitogun, UX Research Consultant and Founder of HerSynergy Tribe, emphasizes how she personalizes reports based on the stakeholders she’s presenting to: