By Anna Rabstad, Service and UX designer at Inmeta
When you have done your research, how do you make sense of it? You probably want to extract some insights from the research, but how? This is a short introduction to what insights is, and how to discover them.
This article was born after I did a short talk on this topic at Pecha Kucha Night in Hamar for a limited audience and was afterwards challenged to embroider it further. Why not? — was my thought and here we go.
Welcome to a short introduction to insights, what it is in a context of service or product design and what it takes to uncover great insights. Disclaimer, all characters are fictious and any similarities with real life are a matter of coincidence.
Let us start with a story about Kari. Kari was born and raised in a small town in Norway, named Hamar. She loves her small-town laying at the coast of Mjøsa, the largest lake in Norway. And she passionately wants to contribute to its development. Even though she has worked at different bars and restaurants in Hamar, she always felt a sense of founder spirit in her and wanted to run her own business. The only problem is that she doesn’t know what this business should be.
One day she goes on vacation to Greece and ends up on a bar boat. A bar boat is a boat that takes its guests on a roundtrip in the bay nearby with delightful music, rich bar and chic interior. After one trip with this boat she felst in love with this concept.
“This was fun! We need this in Hamar!” — she says.
As said so done, she goes back to Hamar and starts to plan her own “Bar boat”!
Kari shares this idea with her friends and family telling them about how fantastic a bar boat could be in her town. A town full of potential and where Norway largest lake is. People seem to be very positive and encourage her to apply for financial support from the local bank.
Kari’s father helps her with administrative things and the bank provides a loan for the start-up.
One early summer the “Bar boat” stands ready by a pier in Hamar.
It goes very well in the beginning. Lots of guests come to the boat for a roundtrip and a drink in Mjøsa. Many positive feedbacks run in, and most people promising to come back. But they don’t.
After a while Kari notices that number of guests is declining. She can simply not wrap her head around it! Why is this happening when most feedbacks are so positive?
What Kari needs now is to understand the underlying reasons for why people do not come to the “Bar boat”.
She needs insights that she can act on and succeed.
Kari talks to her guests to collect feedback and she is very right about it. At this point she has some information she needs, but does she actually have insights?
What are insights?
Let us understand what insights are and are not.
Insights are the patterns we see in what we observe. They show us some specific cause effect relationships in the data we possess. Data or some single piece of information alone is not an insight.
I would like to point out three characteristics that make insights good.
1. Relevant
Insights must be relevant. It means that all the patterns and findings you discover should give you some sort of value, they should answer a certain question you are sitting with. It is like a research question in science.
For Kari who runs a “Bar boat” during summertime, it is relevant to know about habits among people in Hamar and its visitors, so that she can adapt her service for them.
In order to limit the scope of the question, Kari should start with thinking of who will be her potential customers, i.e. locals, guests or businesses. Thereafter she should think of what problem or wish she wants to solve for these people.
Another important thing about shaping relevance is the way you formulate your research question. It should be focused on the needs of your target group, rather than solutions. If you start with solutions, you risk creating a service or product that nobody wants. (Or getting answers that will not help you succeed).
2. Valid
The second characteristic that makes insights good is valid. This means that everything you have learned throughout your research should be well grounded.
Collecting feedback from existing customers is good, but this information is only a part of the truth that is out there. It is like Kari is looking at some puzzle pieces instead of looking at the pattern in the puzzle.
Instead, she should collect information answering her question using different methods that would address the question in various ways.
She could figure out what happens where, by using quantitative methods such as data analysis and questionaries, and why these things happen by using qualitative methods such as interview and observation.
At the same time, we know that what people say and what people do can be two different things. Luckily there are methods that can address both: some help us uncover behavior patterns, other look into people’s attitude.
There is a large wealth of design methods to pick from. Here are just few that would help Kari to get started and collect enough information to begin with understanding nightlife habits of people in Hamar. These methods would also help her discover existing pain points and potential opportunities that she could address in her future service.
3. Actionable
The third and last characteristic I would like to cover is actionable. It means that you should be able to act upon your insights.
In order to do that Kari would need to transform the information she collected into insights through a process called synthesis.
She should start with reviewing all of the information she has and extracting relevant pieces of information that are relevant for the question she has. It would also be beneficial to code these pieces using color-coding or another technique so that she can find them later.
After a while there will be some things that repeat across different information sources. They should be grouped together. This method of grouping similar information pieces into groups is called Affinity mapping.
Another way of structuring findings could be grouping the information into the following sections:
· About the person — information for mapping behavior and mindset of the people involved
· Experience journey — Information related to customer (or user) journey: before, during and after interaction with an organization
· Internal context — information about organization’s goals, ambitions and strategies
· External context — information about trends and powers outside the organization that affect it
· Parking lot — for general observations
When you are done with the walkthrough and grouping, look closely at your groups. An “Eureka moment” might tell you what happens where and why. You should see some patterns or relations you were not aware of.
These are your insights.
If there are no lights at this point, it means that you should collect more information.
Let us say that one of the findings Kari discovered was something that lies before and after an actual Bar boat tour.
“When I’m going out with my friends, I would like to take public transport so that I could have some drinks while I’m out. But ”Bar-boat’s” pier lies far from all public transport and makes it difficult to come to the boat. I wish that “Bar-boat” was easier to access.”
One last thing Kari needs to do before she starts solving this problem is to reframe the challenge into a “How might we…” question. This is a well-known technique that opens up for creative problem solving and makes it easier to act on an insight.
Kari has now discovered a problem that is worth solving and is ready to start with ideation where she can find one or more potential solutions that would give value both to her business and her customers.
Resources
· https://uxplanet.org/what-are-insights-aa1f2d1b3b9c
· Nielsen Norman
