Using Research Synthesis to Build Better Products

A powerful method for uncovering new user insights and surfacing durable customer insights, is a research synthesis.

In academia, a literature review or meta-analysis may be considered a research synthesis. Traditionally, a literature review is a critical first step in understanding a problem space, developing early research questions, and refining hypotheses. In academe, a literature review comes before any further research is conducted. However, this tends not to be the case in industry.

In corporate tech, a research synthesis may be referred to as desk research, secondary research, or a literature review — I’ve heard all the above. I’ve also observed that a research synthesis is not always considered an essential step in performing user research — many times research may occur without any desk research or synthesis at all.

A photo of a desk by Minh Pham on Unsplash.

While not necessarily problematic for informing products tactically, a lack of synthesis over time can lead to researchers down a path of conducting the same research over and over again — moving the insights further away from timelessness and durability.

In the long-run, a lack of synthesis can be a detriment to user research, and ultimately, the user experience, product, and business strategy.

In this article, I focus on the process and framework I’ve used to conduct a quality research synthesis and how I’ve used syntheses to make an impact on the business.

Getting Started with a Research Synthesis

A research synthesis is built upon a mass of user insights, if done well, a synthesis includes insights from market research, sales, qualitative research, and quantitative research. The more streams of insight that are woven into the synthesis, the better — the better your understanding of the user and customer your research should aim to represent in a product or emergent technology.

A photo of threads by Aneta Pawlik on Unsplash.

Supporting and understanding the user is core to what we do as user researchers — a synthesis, again when done well, can help provide a holistic understanding of the user or customer. We can learn so much about user needs and jobs-to-be-done when we start looking at what we have learnt together (e.g., bridging qual and quant to build better products).

And it’s hard — it’s hard to break away from conducting research directly with users.

As user researchers we so much joy from engaging directly with the end user — and immersing ourselves in papers, books, quotes, transcripts, Excel sheets, and other forms of data can seem like it’s lacking that intimate human connection.

In my career in industry so far, I’ve identified a few cases in which a research synthesis can be highly impactful:

A lot is known about a particular space, product, or user, and we need to distill high-level themes from a wellspring of amassed knowledge
Very little is known about a product, space, user, or phenomena — it’s a good time to scratch the surface and inform your research plans and protocols
New lines of business and business strategies are beginning to emerge, and we want user research integrated into that strategy or effort early on

Be strategic about thinking when to conduct your synthesis — look for gaps and impact points across the business.

A Framework for Conducting a Quality Research Synthesis

Step 1. Understand your motivations and goals for conducting a research synthesis.

A research synthesis should by no means be thought of as a replacement for field research or direct engagements with users. A synthesis supplements and compliments primary user research to form a deep, well-rounded understanding of our users and customers.

When conducting a research synthesis, take time to reflect on the outcome, impact, or goals have for the synthesis.

Some common goals that run throughout the syntheses I’ve conducted include:

The need to fundamentally understand users and generate a set of initial user needs to inform product design and development.
The need to integrate user and customer insights into business strategy and shape the direction of the business.
The need to deeply understand a topic that is core to the user experience with a product — say for instance how individuals come to trust technology, how people pay attention for prolonged periods of time, or how teams make critical decisions.
The need to articulate and archive numerous user insights in one place that are timeless and durable — these insights are an be used over to inform the user experience or product direction, establishing within the research.

Some questions to ask yourself at this stage include:

What do you and your team want to uncover through the research synthesis?
What about your stakeholders — what can they learn from your user research synthesis?
What do you, your stakeholders, and your collaborators wish you knew more about users or customers?

Step 2. Start generating research questions to guide the synthesis.

Approaching a research synthesis is much like preparing for a primary research study. It’s helpful to start out with a set of research questions to guide the work. And, we’re user researchers after all, we should be starting with questions.

You’re also about to start digging, sifting, and filtering information. It’s a lot. It can be really overwhelming — start with a core set of user research questions you want answer in your synthesis. This will help you stay focused and keep you, your team, and stakeholders centered.

That said, don’t shy away from adding more questions to your list. Stay curious — you’ll likely find something new from your adventures the literature.

Some questions to help get you prepared for your first research synthesis may include:

What are users’ needs when it comes to interacting with Product X or Product Y? What needs are being met? Are there new needs or gaps in our understanding of user needs?
What have we learned about Product X or Product Y over the last 2 years? 5 years?
What have we learned about customers using Product X and Product Y over the past 5 years? Have their needs changed over time?
What user needs are most important when interacting with Products X and Y? What needs are less critical, but perhaps “delighters” or low-cost features or fixes that engineers and developers could address in their next sprint cycle?
What are unmet or unidentified needs and pain points for users? What workarounds do users have in place to meet their needs when using your product?

Step 3. Begin your literature search.

Some good questions to ask yourself when you initially prioritize and guide your search include:

What are the burning questions on the team? Of those research questions, which have the most impact on the user? What about impact on the team, the organization, or the business?
What gaps in knowledge on the topic you’re researching have existed for quite some time across users, the business, or the team?
What do collaborators and stakeholders really need to know now to guide product design or a larger strategic research effort?
What is the impact of not answering some of these desk research questions?

Hone your search criteria further by developing a core list of key search terms or keywords. Use the same key terms across your search tools (whether these be internal or external libraries) — this will help you maintain consistency and reduce the number of returns in your search.

Here is a sample set of key terms we might use for a report on augmented and virtual reality technologies:

Augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality
Accessibility in AR and VR
Literature review, systematic review, meta-analysis

A tip worth highlighting is to explicitly include the key terms such as literature review or systematic review in your literature search for articles in research libraries.

It’s highly likely that a team of researchers has already done a great deal of synthesis and summarizing of scientific insights and published these in a literature review or systematic review.

When done well, a scientific literature review or systematic review summarizes tens to hundreds of research studies and distills the findings from all of these articles into tangible insights. Sure, these reviews are academically written, but these insights can be woven into your user research insights and the story you are telling as it relates to your product or experience.

Leveraging a pre-existing literature review or systematic review can be extremely helpful in saving time and re-researching a phenomenon that may be well-documented and well-explored. Use insights from literature reviews or meta-analysis to your advantage. This will help you more rapidly execute your research synthesis.

Some research library and search tools that may help get you started include:

Microsoft HITS — our internal user insight research library
PsycINFO, EBSCO, JSTOR, PubMed — reputable and credible databases of scholarly, scientific journal articles and conference proceedings about people and various psychological and sociological phenomena
IEEE, ACM, CHI, HFES — reputable and credible scholarly conference proceeding databases and search tools
Nielsen-Norman Group — leaders in user experience research and training
Google Scholar and ResearchGate

Find out where your organization stores information about customer engagements, marketing insights, sales calls, or quantitative user insights — scouring these resources for themes can add a richness to your research synthesis.

A quality research synthesis will gather and collect a lot of articles upfront. I highly recommend avoiding setting a limit on the number of articles you need to gather for a ‘sufficient’ synthesis — setting a strict count on articles doesn’t make for a quality synthesis.

For instance, if you find 10 garbage journal articles during your search, and you synthesize those for themes and insights, you now just have lots of garbage insights, and presumably build garbage products. Look, you put garbage in, you get garbage out.

Collect as many articles, literature reviews, anecdotes, and pieces of information and data that the team deems relevant in the research synthesis. Don’t stop until you start to see clear answers to your research questions emerge. Don’t stop until you and your research team have a solid understanding of the user and customer.

Anecdotally speaking, the more articles gathered, the richer, and more articulate the user insights. If you’re conducting desk research for the first time, aim for more.

The more you do desk research, the more comfortable you’ll be with assessing how much deeper you need to dig and how many sources are appropriate to support a durable user insight.

Step 4. Manage and distill your user insights.

Now that you have gathered lots of resources, information, and streams of data, critically think about how information needs to be organized to obtain insights.

After giving this presentation at Microsoft UXR Day, I’ve received some great feedback on tools for managing insights feeding a synthesis.

I don’t have a perfect solution, but I highly recommend finding what works best for you and how you like to work. Maybe you go analog and cover a conference room wall with sticky notes — or perhaps you have a stellar Miro or Figma setup to organize themes and insights. Do you!

using-research-synthesis-to-build-better-products-6348f09fd1b

A photo of sticky notes and images by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash.

Once you’ve organized your files, data, anecdotes, notes, and other synthesis inputs, I recommend triaging your research questions. Even better — use your user research questions to guide your file storage, labeling, and management.

Some helpful questions to ask yourself or the team to prioritize the writing and synthesis include:

What do your stakeholders need to know immediately?
What questions can wait or be backlogged into another sprint or V2 of the product?
What’s the impact to a user or customer if a particular research question is addressed now? What about if it is answered later?

Once you’ve prioritized, you have direction. It’s so much easier to research something when you have clarity and something to go after. Now, it’s time to dive into the reading and writing.

Start reading articles, reading notes, analyzing datasets. Treat your synthesis like user research — ask questions about what you’re reading and the trends that start to emerge.

Some questions to reflect on at this stage include:

What are consistent themes across the streams of data and information you gathered?
What are consistent user needs or user pain points emerging across scholarly articles or internal user reports? Why?
What continues to be an unmet need or unaddressed user pain point over time? Why? What about across data streams? What does the qualitative research say? What about the quantitative research?
What are new user insights? Do these contradict older user insights? Why?

From here, start outlining the draft of your synthesis. Write out major themes and durable insights — insights that show up again and again over time and across the resources you’ve collected. Those are critical to communicate back to stakeholders and the user research team.

Tell a story — while it’s not primary user research — a research synthesis can still tell a cohesive story about users, their needs, and their experiences.

Record any new questions that crop up because of your search and synthesis.

Step 5. Share and communicate your user insights.

Once your user research synthesis has reached its final form, share, store, and label your synthesis in a way that is findable over time.

Give your stakeholders, team, and others in the organization access to your synthesis — this is a way of developing impact in your work — the more people that reference your synthesis and come back to it to inform the user experience or product, the better. Syntheses are durable and long-lasting, and so many people in an organization can benefit from your work.

You’ve generated a set of durable insights — this can be powerful in shaping product direction and empowering customers over time.

Step 6. Maintaining your research synthesis.

Research syntheses can evolve over time — they are not stagnant and new knowledge should be incorporated as it is gleaned.

This evergreen philosophy is worth considering when beginning your literature search. It can help with rigorously prioritizing aspects of your synthesis, and ensure you stay in tune with trends and findings related to your research questions, which evolve over time.

When we learn more about users and customers, and we gain new insights, this should be integrated into your research synthesis. Or, perhaps, it spurs a new synthesis. What matters is the knowledge is surfaced with product stakeholders and other user researchers.

Consider how your pastiche of insights may scale or grow over time. Knowledge is a garden to be tended and a research synthesis is no different.