How to analyze user interviews in 5 easy steps

User interviews are a valuable way to unlock customer-centric insights at any stage of your development process. But how do you synthesize the raw data you get from interviews into qualitative research you can use to make informed decisions?

This guide chapter shows you how to analyze user interviews to ensure no insight goes unused. By incorporating this analysis process as part of your workflow, you’ll get more from your user interviews—so you can revisit them again and again to meet all kinds of research objectives.

5 steps for analyzing user interviews

1. Set your user interviews up for success. Recruit diverse participants with key demographic data, and choose a user interview tool for efficient recording and sharing. Take notes during the session and debrief afterward.

2. Organize your data. Centralize your notes in one place, virtually or physically. Group insights into themes, using tags or color codes for easy analysis.

3. Identify patterns and themes. Find sub-themes within larger themes, and create clusters to connect related observations.

4. Summarize and share your key findings. Write a summary using bullet points for easy scanning. Create takeaway sentences for each cluster.

5. Triangulate your data. Cross-reference your interview insights with other data: compare with session recordings, heatmaps, and other user behavior analytics data.

1. Set your user interviews up for success

Planning your user interviews with your ultimate research goals in mind helps you streamline the process from beginning to end. Here are some simple ways to set your interviews up for success.

• Recruit the right participants. Aim to get a diverse range of viewpoints, and be sure to capture key demographic data (such as location, industry, and age) that you can use to analyze your results for trends.

• Use a user interview tool that records and transcribes the session for you. To make things even more efficient, look for a tool that lets you easily share time-stamped clips and notes once you’re in the analysis phase, so you can quickly pull out relevant data points to share with stakeholders.

• Make notes as you go. A time-stamped transcription means you don’t need to take notes, but it’s still worth jotting down standout points to revisit later. Your notes should directly reflect what the participant says or does, not what you interpret them to be saying. This ensures more accurate data and avoids introducing bias that could skew your analysis.

Do a debrief after each session. After your interview, review your notes while your memory is still fresh. Fill in any gaps and add paragraphs or headlines to help you scan the notes quickly. Note down any initial ideas you have, as these can be the starting points for data analysis.

🔥 Setting your user interviews up for success is easy with Contentsquare Interviews

Contentsquare Interviews takes the hassle out of user interviews by streamlining and automating all of the admin—so you can focus on connecting with your participants. Interviews enables you to effortlessly

• Recruit the right people from our pool of over 200,000+ global participants, or invite your own

• Easily schedule, host, and record your interview, so you don’t have to waste time sending calendar invites back and forth

• Invite stakeholders to observe the session

• Instantly receive a time-stamped transcription after your call, making it easy to pick out keywords or valuable insights

• Quickly create highlights to share with your team to support your recommendations and increase buy-in for your next steps

2. Organize your data

When you have your notes from step one, collate them in one central place. Put each thought or response on a separate ‘sticky note’—either virtually, using an app like Miro, or physically, using actual sticky notes and a forgiving wall.

Then, start dividing insights into broader themes. If you’re doing this virtually, create the main themes you’ve identified as tags and tag relevant sticky notes for each one. You could also color-code your physical sticky notes using highlighters or move them into relevant groups or ‘columns’ on your whiteboard.

3. Identify patterns and themes

Once you group your notes into larger themes, you can begin looking for sub-themes or patterns.

Focusing on one theme at a time, find commonalities or contradictions among the responses, and create sub-groups of related observations called clusters. This method is also called affinity mapping or affinity diagramming.

The goal of affinity mapping is to connect pieces of evidence to create a broader insight, helping you connect the dots between discrete pieces of information to see the bigger picture.

4. Summarize and share your key findings

Now that you’ve done your thematic analysis and examined your interview data, summarize your findings and share them with your team members and any other stakeholders.

We recommend writing a TL;DR (short for ‘too long; didn't read’) or using bullet points to make it easy for people to quickly scan and get the information they need. You can also write a summary sentence for each cluster you identified above with the key takeaway and your recommendations for the next steps.

💡 Pro tip: Contentsquare Interviews lets you share short, relevant clips from your user interview as evidence to support your key points so you can validate your takeaways and get buy-in for the next steps.

5. Triangulate your data

Triangulation isn’t just for spy movies in the early 2000s. In research, triangulation is the process of using multiple sources or methods to get a deeper understanding of your topic.

Cross-reference the findings from your user interview analysis with the data and findings from other sources, such as session recordings, heatmaps, surveys, and feedback widgets. How do they compare? Does looking at them in tandem reveal any further insights?

For example, session recordings and heatmap data may reveal discrepancies between what people say and what they do. Your interviewees might think your homepage is simple to navigate, but if your heatmap shows users rage-clicking—that is, repeatedly clicking on something as a sign of frustration—it’s worth exploring further.

📐 Combine Interviews with other Contentsquare capabilities to triangulate your data and understand your users like never before.

While user interviews are super useful on their own, they become even more powerful when combined with other user behavior tools. Combine insights from Interviews with tools like

• Surveys: validate your assumptions after your user interview and see if other users feel the same way as your interviewees

• Feedback: get real-time feedback on the user experience as people scroll through your site, then follow up with user interviews to discover how to improve low-ranking pages

• Heatmaps: identify areas of high and low engagement on your site, then conduct usability tests or UX research via user interviews to learn more

• Journeys: see where users drop off in your checkout flow, then interview users to understand the barriers to conversion

• Session Replay: watch how users navigate your site and quickly spot issues, bugs, and opportunities, then interview users about their biggest pain points goals, and combine these insights to prioritize your roadmap

By using both qualitative and quantitative user research, you'll get the full picture of what your users need—and make improvements that really move the needle for your business.

6 times to conduct user interviews and analysis

Now that you know how easy it is to conduct and analyze user interviews, there’s no reason not to use them throughout the entire development process. Here are 6 times user interviews can help you stay close to your target audience and unlock empathetic, actionable insights.

1. Before building a new product or feature: schedule user interviews to do market research, understand your target audience’s pain points, and learn what they’re looking for from a product.

2. At the concept testing phase: use user interviews to validate assumptions about your concept or prototype before you invest resources into building them.

3. When your product is in beta: leverage user interviews as part of your usability testing phase to understand the user experience and get crucial feedback to make your product or design more user-friendly.

4. Pre-launch: once you’re ready to launch your new product or feature, conduct user interviews to understand whether the messaging in your marketing campaign resonates with your target audience.

5. Post-launch: run user interviews after users have had a chance to engage with your new product, feature, or design to get their honest feedback, so you can continuously iterate and improve.

6. When you notice something wrong: spotted something in your session recordings or heatmaps that you want to investigate? Noticed a suspicious change in your conversion rate or a drop-off in your funnels? User interviews are a great way to talk to real users and understand what could be driving these changes.

Why you need to make user interviews and analysis a regular part of your workflow

While interviews are an empathetic, user-focused research method, they’re traditionally time-consuming to schedule and run, particularly when you’re they’re one-on-one. In the past, parsing through recordings to find the exact nuggets you needed would take time—as would finding ways to synthesize the data across multiple interviews.

Now that it’s easier than ever to conduct user interviews and turn your insights into actions, there’s no reason not to use them for all of your pressing research questions. Here are 3 compelling reasons to incorporate user interviews and analysis into your workflow.

1. Understand what your users want

User interviews help you stay close to your users and understand your target audience’s wants, needs, and preferences, so you can better cater to them.

2. Make data-driven decisions

Get valuable qualitative data and combine it with your existing quantitative data to make more informed, data-driven decisions about which products or features to prioritize next.

3. Stay on top of trends

User needs and preferences change. By conducting regular user interviews, you can chart how they evolve, spot emerging trends, and ensure you maintain a competitive advantage.

🤖Pro tip: want to become a pro interviewer? Try using AI to boost the impact of your user interviews.

Enrich any research project with user interviews

User interviews uncover unique insights that help you empathize with your users, but to unlock their true potential, they need to be analyzed properly. Use the tactics outlined above to transform your user interview data from notes on a page into tangible improvements that delight your users.

FAQs about how to analyze user interviews