Here, we will focus on one of the most common methods for analyzing semi-structured interviews: thematic analysis. It’s important that you properly analyze your interviews, but there is no single right way to perform qualitative data analysis, and the method you choose primarily depends on the actual purpose of your study. But if your time is limited, it’s always better to narrow the scope of your study than to skip steps in the analysis phase and jump straight to acting on your results. Analyzing your results takes time, especially if your purpose is broad and explorative. A proper analysis also makes it easy for other people to understand exactly how you reached your various conclusions about your participants and will make your results much more trustworthy. A proper analysis will ensure that you go through your data in a systematic and thorough manner. There is a lot going on in an interview situation, and it’s easy to overlook information that doesn’t fit with your preconceived assumptions of what people were going to say and do during your interviews. Although you might feel like you have a pretty good idea of what people have told you and you are eager to get started implementing your insights, doing a proper analysis is important for the validity of your results. Depending on the complexity of your project, this can be a simple or a complex task, but no matter what your project is, it’s important that you follow certain guidelines for how to analyze your interviews. When you have carried out user interviews, the next step is to analyze what people have told you. Here, we will teach you how to go from information chaos to patterns and themes that represent the most interesting aspects of your data and which you can use as the foundation for personas, user scenarios and design decisions. All that information can be overwhelming, and it’s difficult to know where to start to make sense of all the data. You have been in the field talking to users and you now find yourself with a massive amount of audio, notes, video, pictures, and interesting impressions.

Thematic analysis using nvivo