User Research Documentation

Temporarily missing some research resources, I had been helping our team to facilitate and distill research during our design process.

For a particular feature, our team collaborated on some team calls with customers to test our design assertions, user flows and prototype on our platform. All notes were added to a shared Google document, which I organized in Trello as raw data. I then presented to my team for feedback on what may work best for everyone. I got some great feedback about some ways to think about the themes, which pushed me to revisit how to organize and distill further.

The next step was figuring out a way to make themes digestible and actionable by both our team and others across the organization. I decided to paste all of the points in a separate "staging" area (I used Evernote) and grouped by theme. This made it easy to see how to organize them visually in Trello because the groups stood out to me. Another thing that stood out easily was that there was a lot of common feedback, following by a trickling of rare points. 

So I decided to use columns in Trello organized by:

• Contingencies to Success
• Confirmed Problems We Solved in the Design
• Further ideas to explore or distribute to a more appropriate business unit (pricing, etc)

All of the themes were either mentioned one, 2+, 3+ or higher, so I used color labels to order them in priority. The things that were mentioned the most were at the top of the list and had a red label, 2+ were orange, and then no label for low priority with a mention of only once.

A decision that I feel made this method even more effective was that the original cards were archived and linked inside each related point. This way the themes were very easy to understand and act on, but the original data points were not lost. If a user wanted more detail about a card they could open it up and dig deeper. I was delighted to find that when archiving cards in Trello you could still link to them. It really helped to keep things clean without losing information.