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Welcome to the world of sense-making—and you're in charge of synthesizing user insights into digestible themes. As far as UX research goes, this part is the most fun (in our opinion). When experience, creativity, business acumen, user insight, design, and more all come together. It's time to make sense of what we really learned about the user—actions, behaviors, thoughts, inactions, etc. Boil it down, and squish it together (technical term 😂) for your stakeholders to comprehend.
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Up until this point, you've poured sweat and tears (probably more tears; hopefully no blood) figuring out how to write effective user research tasks. You've extracted loads of information from your interview sessions, or other research method outputs, and agonized over how to best analyze user data for insights. And you're excited to strategize how to succeed in user insight storytelling. But first, you've got a whole lot of thoughts floating around in your head, on spreadsheets, behind sticky notes, and in thin air that you need to nail down before the breeze of time 🍃 blows them away.
That's right. It's time to dial in your Insight Themes.
There's no better time than now. We know it can be difficult to turn the analysis ⤵ synthesis corner. However, to convert the most compelling user insights into Insight Themes is exciting! It takes time (to do right), but's completely necessary. Therefore, in this article, we'll discuss what Insight Themes are, and from where they come. We'll describe the value of why keeping it simple works. We'll break down the 7-components that make up a compelling Insight Theme. And we'll share a downloadable template with examples for you to use / reference.
So follow us on our journey of sense-making by way of Insight Theme creation.
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Let's first begin by defining an insight. It all starts with that initial nugget of gold. An insight is a new piece of information that gives us a better understanding of the user, while providing an opportunity to do something about it. It's an a-ha! with an angle for the business to act upon.
An Insight Theme is a group of insights that share some common element.
Insight Themes are more powerful than a single insight because they have force in numbers. Data drives decision-making in the business world. Therefore, to make confident UX recommendations, we need substantiated user insights. Insight Themes are just that. They're the culmination of seeing that a-ha! from a number of different ways, angles, or users. Insight Themes are the result of many insights coming together — qualitatively, quantitatively, and auto-magically 🪄.
Insight Themes are born out of a thorough analysis process. Breaking down the raw data from user interviews, user observations, dog-fooding experiences, SME interviews, and other UXR methods supply the insights we need to search for Insight Themes. Also required is a sound understanding for the business and product. This gives the UX researcher context for what they're searching — and why.
Data, experience, and curiosity all play a pivotal role in the Insight Theme creation process.
Ultimately, through insight identification, sorting, arranging, re-arranging, and theming (of course), a UX researcher will come to a place where they have enough content for 3–7 Insight Themes 🤯.
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The Turbo UXR Playbook is your tactical reference 👇 guide — free to download!
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As the old saying goes... keep it simple, stupid. But you're not stupid. You're actually extremely smart. And you have a lot of valuable information swimming around in your head (and in/on stickies, booklets, spreadsheets, etc.). We've come to the moment of putting it all down on "paper" for others to learn. The goal is to get this information out as quickly, efficiently, and exhaustively as possible. Especially, so the big insights can be shared with product who will take action! All to improve the user experience.
Before we break down the 7 compelling components, we'll share 3 reasons to keep the synthesis of Insight Themes simple. Because simple is as simple does.
First, keeping the process of compiling simple Insight Themes allows the UX researcher to move faster. This is because you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you're sharing out to stakeholders. Establish an Insight Theme framework, and stick to it. Below, we'll share ours so you can take example, or use it directly. We're happy to help other researchers focus on function and less on form. The easier it is to plug-and-play your user insights into an Insight Theme format, the faster you can move.
Second, adhering to a common standard in Insight Theme creation allows for others to know what to expect of your work. Given a few projects with you, stakeholders will learn what your typical outputs look like. This is important to reduce cognitive load on others. You're already asking a lot of your partners when you're sharing new insight into the users' actions, behaviors, emotions, decisions, etc. You don't want to add more deciphering (of your deliverable) on top of that. So stick to a simple / standard framework to bring more people along.
Third, keeping Insight Themes simple helps you scale your work. A faster process combined with ushering more people along is a great foundation. Getting your UX research process to scale adds even more value to the business and user experience. You can apply your Insight Theme framework to more projects at once. You can get your team to adopt it as a common standard. And most importantly, you can use insight themes to build an insight database, which yields even more strategic value by generating design principles. Scaling UX research processes is absolutely necessary, and keeping it simple supports this cause.
Titles are important, since they're the first things a stakeholder will read when trying to comprehend your presentation. Therefore, you've got to put some careful thought into them. It won't take very long to write (only 10 words or less), but it'll sure make a difference.
For example, don't write just a one-word title. Please. Don't. Your reader will thank you. They need a wee bit more context. With titles, the goal is to be accurate, catchy, and descriptive, yet to-the-point 📌. We recommend your title to be 5–10 words in length for optimal balance of content and brevity. It's best to write the title first, and then re-visit it again later. After you complete the other sections of the Insight Theme, you'll have a more crystalized view on the main point of the theme. So, fill the title in it as a V1, and then come back later to make it an even better V2.
Some additional tips include: use alliteration and include an emoji. Alliteration — the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words — helps to make things more memorable. It's useful in that it creates interest for the listener or reader. It's catchy and fun to pick up on alliteration, without posing a significant mental load. Similarly, inserting an emoji that summarizes the Insight Theme helps as well. Even better that emoji's are easy to find, visual, and open-source.
Return to overview ⤴
User Stories are a gateway drug to Agile. Product development teams using Agile methodology are very familiar with User Stories and know what to do with them. User Stories are one of the best ways to describe what the user needs — and why. It just so happens, User Stories are a fantastic tool for summarizing the main point of the Insight Theme.
Upon completion of your theming process, writing out the User Story to describe the theme is an ideal next step. It forces the UX researcher to get highly specific about what the Insight Theme means. User Stories are a useful way to drive clarity and specificity, without undue burden. You'll want to include one within every Insight Theme. The goal of User Stories is to clearly document who needs what, and why 🧑. This short phrase will then be brought to life through the remaining components of the theme.
For more tips, read our article on how to write a user story from UX research to learn more about User Story's purpose and long-term value. We break down 4 elements of an effective User Story, and provide the framework to follow when writing.
Return to overview ⤴
There's nothing like the written word to show a user's intent and feelings about a subject (well, maybe except for video — in which case, see #4). Verbatims give us a way to read the spoken words of a user. Documenting this makes things more concrete. We're not paraphrasing what users said, we're showing you exactly what they did say.
Verbatim quotes can be a very powerful tool for building empathy and understanding. This is because they do a good job of retaining the essence of the user's thoughts and feelings. The goal of documenting the user's spoken word 💬 into writing is to be more searchable, scannable, visual, and enduring. Not only does this continue to round out the Insight Theme, but it makes the insight stand the test of time. You can use manual or automated tools to search the text in the future to easily reference users' interests.
One additional tip is to use ellipses when writing out verbatim quotes. You only have so much space on a slide, so be judicious. Choose the parts and pieces that have greatest impact. When you use ellipses, you can skip ahead to the next part... like this... then that... and so on. Don't alter, just remove the filler / fluff, and get to the point.
Return to overview ⤴
Video is the holy grail of user insights. Video provides the opportunity to show what the user doing / saying / not doing / along with emotions, emphatic pauses, and more. Oh my! Video clips are the superfood of the Insight Theme ingredient list.
Since no one has much patience or time, we recommend creating highlight video reels that quickly substantiate your theme. 30–120 second clips do the trick. The goal of video highlight clips is to see 👁 users illustrating the Insight Theme's main point — without question. The value of video is it can do a lot of the work for you in terms of summarization. Additionally, a long-term video repository is a great resource to have. So it's best to start now.
Here's a tip: go one step further to craft sub-themes within your highlight video. Choose at least 3 examples of users saying / doing the same thing to validate the finding. Even better when different users make the same point in a slightly different manner or approach. This construct makes the video more engaging, rather than pure repetition. Provide additional insight and nuance where possible, without boring your viewers.
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To include them, or not, that is the question. By them, we're referring to specific recommendations to improve the UX. More change tends to happen as a result of including them vs. not. However, not all projects require them. Some teams might not want them. Those teams may need time to digest findings to arrive at their own conclusions & solutions. In which case, you should leverage the 'How might we...' statement in place.
3–5 pointed recommendations catalyzes the theme into 'So, what?'. For stakeholders who zoned out, or those looking to understand what this really means for the product, recommendations make things clear. The goal of specific recommendations are to instigate change by directly stating 👄 what needs to happen. There's no beating around the bush here. In very clear terms, state what needs to change to improve the user experience. These recommendations are thought-starters, and ought to provoke conversation about what we should do next.
Some specific tips include: start with a verb when writing recommendations. Verbs make the statements action-oriented. For example, 'Do [X]', 'Change [Y]', or 'Remove [Z]'. Also, keep the statement short, sweet, and direct. There's time later to clean up and add more detail to your recommendation descriptions. Lastly, if the team isn't ready for recs, then insert a 'How might we...' statement in it's place. Reformat the User Story, and turn it into a question. For example, 'How might we help / support / solve for / users who need [X], because [Y], so that [Z]?'.
Return to overview ⤴Insight Themes are allowed to be fun. In fact, they're more impactful when stakeholders remember them, share them, and restate them on your behalf. Taking some time to make your themes memorable and catchy helps immensely with driving positive results from UXR.
There's a number of different ways you can make Insight Themes catchy. We'll explain a few, but this is where your personal / professional creativity really shines. Personally, we like to use alliteration, assonance and rhyming in titles. Also, imagery, colors, relevant .gifs, good design, and other wordplay can all do the trick. The goal is to make your Insight Themes memorable and fun 🎈 to share / talk about.
Our biggest tip here is to give yourself time to be creative. If you've budgeted next to zero time to synthesize Insight Themes, your deliverables won't be much fun. Nor will the process itself. But when you carve out some buffer time to dwell, reflect, and iterate, you might be surprised at your creative outcome. Trust us. It won't take much.
Return to overview ⤴It shouldn't begin and end with just one Insight Theme. You'll likely have 3–7 Insight Themes for each UXR project. In fact, we recommend that number range exactly. And how you tell the story across multiple Insight Themes becomes just as, or more important than the individual themes within.
Now that you've processed all the insights and compiled your series of Insight Themes, it's time to connect them all together. You've got to decide whether you're ordering them by priority, experience touchpoints, perceived momentum, or some other way. At the very least, avoid placing Insight Themes in the same order in which you completed them. The goal is to proactively curate a captivating story 🤯 for stakeholders, using all your Insight Themes as major plot points. Your content will dictate the narrative, so be cognizant of it having one. This helps tremendously with stakeholder engagement and comprehension.
For more tips, we have an article dedicated to the storytelling process. See our 3 Points to Successful User Insight Storytelling to learn how we structure Insight Theme presentation share outs. In a nutshell, it's best to start with positive appreciation, dig into UX opportunities, and then drive home recommendations.
Return to overview ⤴But wait, there's more! More templates and examples to be specific. We know it's always better to start with a template and some examples to reference. So, we're happy to share our simple Insight Theme starter presentation that you can download and use for free . However, you've got to reach out us for examples though 😉.
This template won't do all the work necessary to plan, gather, analyze, and synthesize the Insight Themes. But it sure as hell will give you a good place to start for stakeholder presentations. And that's the first step in moving insights into action. For additional templates, see our article — 6 Templates with Examples for UXR Projects — learn more on how to run UX research project with templates that generate actionable user insights for product design.
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Work smarter, not harder.
The Turbo UXR Playbook is your tactical reference 👇 guide — free to download!
Get the Playbook
Learn More
