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The first processing step is to recap an interview as soon as it’s done. This is when it’s freshest in your head and easiest to recall important details.
Processing your notes immediately after also allows you to reach out to the customer for clarification when it’s still fresh in their mind too.
Review your notes, summarize the highlights, and think of any follow-up questions you might want to add to a thank you email.
When you’ve completed your interviews, gather your processed notes and highlights.
As you go through, not everything will relate to your research topic, but lots of interesting unrelated things can be found. There are always surprises.
There are seven steps to fully process your data:
1. Familiarize yourself with your data
The first step to analyzing data qualitative or quantitative is to lightly familiarize yourself with it.
It’s likely been a little while since you did your first customer interview. Taking a quick glance at everything will refresh your memory.
It will also give you a sense of structure and help you start to see patterns and key terms.
For each interview, review the customer profile and scan your notes and highlights for a general idea of what will be interesting.
2. Find key terms
Once you have a good grasp of your data, it’s time to start digging in and looking for key terms.
They should either have particular importance to your research goal or are repeated more often than others.
You’ll look for relevant words, phrases, sentences, and sections and annotate them with labels that closely match.
These labels will help you identify important data types and patterns and help you reference your research later.
Read each transcript carefully. Take note of words and phrases that align with the topic of your research, especially anything repeated or said in relation to strong emotions the interviewee expressed.
Find key terms that are one of the following:
What to look for:
Best practices:
3. Organize your labels into categories
Take all your labels and organize them into categories. They will sit at different levels of detail.
Some will be general and fit into broad categories while some will be more specific and fit into subcategories.
If a label can apply to multiple categories or subcategories, put it in both with a copy.
You’ll combine them later into larger, more general themes in the next step, so make sure your categories aren’t too high-level.
This is an iterative process and up until the end, you’ll see:
Your labels that don’t fit into categories or subcategories will go in a pile and be saved for step five.
4. Putting categories into themes
In a similar process to step three, you consolidate your categories and subcategories into general themes.If a category or subcategory can apply to multiple themes, put it in both.
Some categories will be so interesting they work as their own theme.
Like step three, searching for themes is an iterative process where you move categories back and forth to try forming different themes.
Your categories and subcategories that don’t fit into a theme and aren’t interesting enough to stand alone will go in a pile and be saved for step five.
Once you’re finished with this step, make sure to take a long break before starting step five. This will allow you to review your work with fresh eyes and find new relationships.
5. Review themes
Once you’re done with your break you’ll want to review your work from step four. Here you’ll refine your themes and clean them up for step seven where you’ll draw your conclusions.
You might find new themes in the process.
You’re looking for themes that:
After going through your themes, review the piles of labels and categories you made in steps three and four. They may fit in an existing theme or support the introduction of a new one.
Whatever is left in your piles from steps three and four that isn’t interesting enough by itself should be tossed out.
6. Capture the context around the theme
Now that we’ve finalized our themes, we need to add the context surrounding the key terms that make up the theme.
Reference back to where the key terms came from in your notes for each theme.
Look at the text preceding and following the key term.
What’s the context surrounding that key term?
You’re looking for:
7. Draw conclusions
Now you can draw your conclusions from your research. Some conclusions you’ll feel sure about and others will need more investigation.
You can be sure about conclusions that:
Whereas you should be interested, but wary of conclusions that:
You analysis can lead to:
When you’re reporting your findings to your team, it’s very important to try to represent your interview as transparently as possible.
This includes everything from how you recruited customers to how you performed analysis.
Being transparent about your research process makes it easier for people to trust your results.
And while your conclusions might still have critics, knowing you represented your process honestly, you should have no problem defending your results.