DEFINE
FINDING THE PATTERNS
With our interviews completed, we were now ready to dive into the data and get to the heart of understanding our users and their struggles.
At the end of this phase, we needed to define the main opportunities and pain points that this product would seek to remedy.
RESEARCH DATABASE
The first step towards synthesizing our data was to prune the interviews by extracting key quotes from the transcripts. This process not only helped us to collect quotes as a powerful tool for generating empathy with stakeholders, but it forced us to spend time in the data, really developing a deeper knowledge of our interviewees and their stories.
Once the interview had been pruned, we went through the process of tagging our data, in preparation for affinity mapping.
AFFINITY MAPPING
While our database allowed us to set high level categorizations, it was difficult to work together as a team in a spreadsheet. Using Miro as our digital whiteboard, we created affinity maps to identify the patterns and themes that would provide the backbone for our personas and journey maps.
PERSONAS
I had heard from a lot of different people in our interviews, but I wanted to really define who our target audiences would be. Not only would crafting personas helped me to differentiate the various needs and motivations of our users, but it would serve as a reminder throughout the project of who we were building for.
EXPERIENCE MAPS
One of the challenges of this project was determining a framework for defining our user’s journey, because each employer had a slightly different method for finding candidates. To accommodate multiple methods of completing a task, we created an experience map that gave us a comprehensive view of the different paths a user could take, and the pain points associated with each.
PAIN POINT
However, this resulted in two enormous maps for each of our populations. While it may have been a helpful internal tool, we needed something that was easily digestible for the stakeholders.
JOURNEY MAPS
Rather than presenting our enormous experience maps, I trimmed our maps to the bare essentials so that we could focus on the pain points and opportunities of our users. This resulted in two versions; one for the appendix, and a simplified version during the presentation.
KEY OPPORTUNITIES
Designing for people you can’t go out and observe makes it really difficult to empathize with our users, so creating a persona who could function as our target audience was critical to keeping the team aligned and solving the right problems.
