Turning findings into insights

Data analysis leads to findings, but findings need to be turned into actionable insights.

Once you’ve analysed your data, your findings are what you’ve learned. Findings are statements such as:

• senior users struggle to read the font size
• users did not complete the process when they were asked to create an account
• users are confused about what’s required because so many questions are optional
• in eye-tracking tests, users kept looking at the logo at the top of the screen
• users did not like having to repeatedly type information into the form
• users were frustrated when they were redirected to a different website halfway through the process

Findings are statements that are derived from your data analysis, but they are not actually useful on their own. They do not tell you what you or your team should do or what actions to take.

Findings are descriptive, meaning they simply state what was observed during research.However, it’s not enough just to say you’ve seen something – you need to be able to explain why it’s important.

Insights are explanatory. It is putting the finding in context and using it to explain why something happens. This leads to actionable insights – something that the team can work to fix to solve a problem and meet user needs.

In step 3.12, we analysed some fictional poll data and found a majority of learners have some prior knowledge of user research. We decided based on that that we could go into more detail in a future run of this course – this was an insight based on those findings.

An insight should be intuitive, which here means that it makes sense in context, but also not immediately obvious.

For example, writing an introductory course means starting with the basics – but it may be that in some places, we could have gone into more detail. This would not be something that we could have known prior to launching the course and conducting some user research – you need to gather data, analyse it, and generate the insight to come to that sort of conclusion.

Task

Using the list of findings above, try to think of some different actionable insights that you could take from them and share your ideas in the comments.

Please note: there is no ‘correct’ answer here – the goal is to try and think of an action that you could take based on that finding. There will be many different options, depending on your perspective!