How to analyse user interviews and find themes

Before you open a single transcript, write down the decision your interviews were meant to help you make. It tells you what to look for, and what to leave out. You'll hear plenty of interesting things that don't help you decide, and that's fine.

Start soon after the calls, ideally within a few days, while you still remember the tone of each conversation. If you wrote your top three takeaways after each call, read those first.

Go through each interview and pull out short pieces of evidence: a quote, a story, a workaround, a moment someone got stuck. Keep each one small, about one idea, so you can move it around later.

• Keep people's exact words. “I ask my brother to send it for me” says more than “relies on family for payments”.
• Note who said it and when, so you can go back to the moment.
• Write down what people did, not only what they said they'd do. Behaviour is stronger evidence than opinion.
• Pull out surprises and things that go against what you expected. They're often the most useful.

On myUsersInsight, every call is transcribed with timestamps. Choose a line in the transcript, then Highlight it. Copy quote gives you the line with the person's name and the time.

Give every piece of evidence a short tag that says what it's about, like “trust in mobile money” or “data costs”. Use the same tag when the same idea comes up again, even when people use different words.

• Start with a few tags and add new ones as you need them. Don't build the full list before you start.
• Keep tags short and plain, so anyone on your team understands them.
• If one tag gets very big, split it. If two tags keep overlapping, merge them.

On myUsersInsight, you tag a highlight when you make it, or add a new tag on the spot. Each tag becomes a theme in Insights.

Now step back and look across every interview at once. This is often called affinity mapping: you put related evidence side by side and look for patterns. A sticky-note wall, a spreadsheet or a research tool all work.

A theme is a pattern, not a single story. Count how many different people it came from. One loud person with a strong opinion is a quote. Five people saying the same thing in their own words is a theme.

• Look at each theme person by person, to check it isn't just one or two people talking a lot.
• Look for differences between groups too, for example new users and long-time users, or people in towns and cities.
• Keep the evidence that doesn't fit. It might be the start of a theme you'll see in the next round.

On myUsersInsight, Insights shows every highlight from every session, grouped by tag, with the biggest themes first. Show highlights from one person at a time to see how much each theme depends on them.

A tag like “payments” doesn't tell anyone anything. Turn each theme into a short sentence that says what you learned, then back it with two or three quotes.

• Weak: “Payments”.
• Strong: “People don't trust a new app with their money until someone they know has used it.”

Say how many people it came from, like “6 of 8 people”, so readers know how strong it is. Five to eight interviews show you patterns, not percentages, so don't turn them into statistics.

Then write what it means for the decision you started with: what you'll build, change, stop or test next.

Most research fails after the analysis, when a long report nobody reads goes into a folder. Keep it short, and let people hear users in their own words.

• Lead with your three to five biggest themes and what you recommend.
• Show short clips or quotes for each one. Hearing a user struggle changes minds faster than any summary.
• Run a short session where the team reads the themes together and agrees what to do next.

On myUsersInsight, open a theme to see all its evidence and who said it, copy its quotes, and add clips to a highlight reel you can share with your team.

Share participants' words, not who they are. Don't publish a participant's name, face or voice outside your team without their permission.

• Looking only for evidence that proves what you already believed.
• Treating one memorable story as a pattern.
• Mixing up what people said they'd do with what they actually did.
• Waiting weeks to analyse, until the details have faded.
• Doing it alone. A second person tagging the same interviews catches what you missed.

1. Write down the decision your interviews were meant to help you make.
2. Pull out short quotes and moments, with who said them and when.
3. Tag each one with what it's about, and reuse tags for the same idea.
4. Group tags into themes, and count how many people each came from.
5. Write each theme as a sentence, backed by two or three quotes.
6. Say what each theme means for your decision.
7. Share your top themes with clips, and agree next steps with your team.