Crafting Insights

Why should you use this method?

• Uncover new discoveries that inspire and are relevant to your challenge
• Make sense of the data from your own perspective
• Share your research outcomes

What is an insight?

Insight = Observation + your Interpretation

Insights are a succinct expression of what you have learned from your field research activities. They always offer a new perspective, even if they are not new discoveries. They are inspiring and relevant to your challenge and go beyond merely summarizing verbal information.

Good insights are:

• Informative

  • Come from your research (=you didn’t know it before)
  • Non-obvious, surprising

• Inspiring

  • Contain a revealing interpretation of the research
  • Do not include a solution

• Memorable

  • One-sentence statements
  • Easy to read and understand

Creating an insight means synthesizing your findings by analyzing your data and adding your interpretation to it. When interpreting data, it is important to stick to a neutral point of view and always consider the context in which the data appears. However, your insight will always be subjective and contain a new assumption regarding your challenge. Therefore, insights should be supported and validated through additional research.

Watch this short video to see how a team crafted insights from their interviews using the framework suggested in the template!

How can you craft inspiring insights?

There are various ways to frame your research results into inspiring insights that can be shared with the team or other stakeholders. The steps presented here are only one way to get there and are a mixture of unpacking learnings and formulating insights together. Check out the template and example for download to assist you in crafting insights!

1. Invite your team

Unpacking interviews, sharing learnings, and formulating insights is best done with your team. Everyone has a different perspective and might interpret your results differently.

2. Collect your facts

I was surprised to hear/observe …

Everyone takes 10 minutes to note down on Post-its: What did you hear or observe? What type of user/interviewee did it come from? Try to be specific to make your statements relatable for other team members by writing down quotes and specific situations.

If you already unpacked and clustered your learnings, you can also share things that several users had in common. However, don’t forget to mention the user they came from!

3. Share your facts

In the following 5 minutes, each team member shares their facts with the team.

4. Add your interpretation

I wonder if that means …?

Now it is time to add your personal interpretation of the facts. You can either write down your interpretations individually and discuss them afterward, or share and discuss them at the same time. Don’t hold back with contradicting interpretations!

5. Formulate your insights

Rephrase your interpretations into informative, inspiring, and memorable insights. Don’t worry if you are not happy with your first try. Get different ideas down first and then, with the team, agree on the best formulation.

What’s up next?

Insights are great to inspire the team moving on and to be shared with stakeholders outside the team.

Test and validate your insights again, using different research options. If validated, use the insights to formulate an inspiring Problem Statement, which is the basis for developing a solution to your challenge (Module 2).