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A Practical Guide to Information Architecture ~ Analysing user research
Methods Just as you should use more than one method for user research, it’s good to use more than one method for analysis. They each offer a different way of learning about what you have. Here are five different methods you can use. Exploring the data One of the easiest analysis methods is to just immerse yourself in the data and explore it a little. This gives you a feel for the type of information you have and the very high-level patterns.
Figure 7 – 1. Exploring the data with a spreadsheet
My favourite way of doing this is to drop everything into a spreadsheet with columns labelled source, tag and comment. First I go through and record lots of stuff in the comments column. This is the start of deconstructing the data – identifying the individual pieces. Each row represents one thing from the research. Yes, I know ‘thing’ isn’t a very helpful description, but this isn’t a precise method. My ‘things’ are usually individual sentences from an interview transcript, search terms from internal search, comments made during a card sort, answers from