Video

Thematic Analysis of Qualitative User Research Data

Maria Rosala · Nielsen Norman Group Free Intermediate

This walks through exactly the analysis step your question is stuck on, how to go from a stack of interview notes to a small number of real themes without kidding yourself that everything is a theme. It is a practical, visual demonstration rather than theory, useful right before you sit down with your own 20 transcripts. Watch it for the specific technique of coding and clustering, which maps directly onto sorting your interviews by who and how badly.

• Code your notes with short, consistent labels before trying to spot themes.
• A theme needs to recur across multiple people, not just feel interesting to you.
• Sort and re-sort your codes more than once, the first grouping is rarely the sharpest one.