This article was originally published in the Fall 2016 edition of VIEWS Magazine. For the past several years I’ve incorporated NVivo into my work, when the project is complex. Products such as NVivo are widely used in academia, but less so in the commercial world, though there is a big need for this type of technology. The UX world is gradually learning about QDA and its value because many threads need to be woven together in a typical UX study and the data comes from varying digital sources such as video, audio, spreadsheets, and transcripts. This article presents a case study of how I leverage QDA in one type of UX research – customer journey mapping.
As qualitative researchers, we often need to mine for insights through mountains of unstructured digital data such as transcripts, videos, photographs, web analytics, and social media posts. Though many of us might enjoy the analysis portion of a project, this phase can be very time consuming. In this article I am going to introduce you to game-changing tools that can greatly improve your efficiency with data analysis and synthesis, once you get the hang of it. The technology is called qualitative data analysis software (QDA), and I am going to demonstrate how it works by showing how you might leverage it in a real project—building a customer journey map.
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