Synthesizing Your Research

Synthesis is about making sense of design research. It is about creating a clear value of your design research. Synthesis in a human centered design is a collaborative process of sense making which leads to create a coherence summary of all data gathered during a design research.

Synthesis can be measured in three major steps:
1. Get it out: This first step is all about externalizing all the design data gathered during design research, to make the content free to move and manipulated by the team. This way entire set of design can be seen at once which will help you and your team and cover implicit and hidden meanings. Frequently designers keep the contents of research in their head or their laptop. It limits the ability to freely manipulated the associated research contents. In human centered design, the goal is to make the individual learnings a group knowledge. One way of starting to make sense of a data is to share with your team the most inspiring stories heard from the people you are designing for. Think about user stories or experiences that have stuck with you, the stories which surprised you. As you listen to your team mates stories, write down notes and observations and by end of the process you will have hundreds of possibilities which are organized around each research activities.

1. Decide how to write your post IT notes
2. Start downloading right after each activity
3. Share all your research
4. Immerse yourself

2. Organize Chaos: This is all about organizing all the data gathered to find patterns and themes. It will help you and your team to go from group knowledge to start building common understanding of your user’s needs. It is about reaching a consensus on your team about what are the most compelling and consistent problems of people for whom you design for are facing. Gather team from previous step and move the most compelling and inspiring once to a new board and insert in to category and review all the information.

1. Don’t be afraid to judge
2. Be comfortable with ambiguity
3. Be patient and take breaks

3. Interpret Thoroughly: This is about identifying and interpreting the grouping and their relationship to make it explicit and informative. Identifying the groupings and forging connections to know why the elements are related. The goal is to gain the complete picture of your user’s needs that can be clearly communicated and easily translated in to opportunity for design. Take the grouping you identified previously and start by giving them names. Then for each theme, create a insight statement which will transform in to what feels like the core insight of your research.

1. Take some distance and be abstract
2. Trust the data
3. Refine your insights