Insight Mapping

If you have made good progress with your field research, it is time to gather all of your field research findings in one place and reveal the perspectives of your target audience that will be useful in designing solutions. The output of this exercise will be key themes, which are significant patterns of your target group about your innovation topic. You can then create additional maps for different purposes.

Share What You have Learned and Interpret Together

Bring the team together in a room with plenty of wall space. Start by removing distractions and sitting in a circle. Ask everyone to take turns to describe their findings from the process of gaining insights. At this stage, make use of the filled-in 4W+1H Canvases. But go beyond these forms and have everyone tell the stories they encountered. During the narration, have other group members write interesting and noteworthy parts on sticky notes. Attach the sticky notes to the wall or cardboard with other interesting photos and examples you have collected. When doing this, try to group as many related things together as possible.

Now comes the hardest part... How you interpret the mountain of data in front of you is crucial. In field research, everyone in the team sees a different part of the elephant. Therefore, the conclusions of team members may contradict. It is important that the team is aware of this and tries to interpret their conflicting findings as different pieces of the puzzle. The following steps can help in this process.

Review all the materials on the wall. Discuss, interpret and reorganize. Do not stop until everyone agrees that the outputs are rich enough for solution design. If you have done a sufficiently detailed research phase, you should have a good idea of the priorities of your target audience.

Determine what is seen as important or unimportant, what problems are considered excessive or moderate, what gains are felt to be must-haves or nice-to-haves by the majority of the target audience. Make a simple ranking for this.