A user research repositoryinterview findings you can find again

Method

1. 1

   Check what consent allows before anything goes in

   Read the consent terms for each study before you bring it in. They say where participants’ data may be kept, who may see it and for how long. If they, or your company’s policy on third-party tools and AI, do not cover your assistant’s provider and a library that assistant reads, keep only synthesised insights here, without quotes, or keep the study out.

   Participants appear only as numbers, P01 to P12. The key that links numbers to names and contact details stays in your research operations tool, never in know.sh.

2. 2

   Have your assistant file each study

   Give your assistant one study’s anonymised session notes and its plan, and ask it to file a document on the right product-area shelf, titled with the method and the month: Invoice approval interviews — June 2026. The title tells a reader, and Look up, what kind of evidence is inside.

   Ask for the overview to give the research question, the method, the participants by segment (“nine office managers at companies of 20 to 200 staff”), the dates, where the recordings live, and a line on consent: “Anonymised quotes may be used internally until June 2028.”

3. 3

   Check the Evidence findings and their quotes

   Each observation should be an Evidence finding, titled with the theme first, then the observation: “Offline work: technicians write job notes on paper and type them up at night”. Under the title comes the quote as a quotation, then a session reference line: “P07 · session 3 · 14:20”, with the link to the clip in your research tool as the source. In the editor, check every quote word for word against the notes; an assistant will tidy speech into something nobody said.

   Anonymise before your assistant sees the notes, not after. Remove names, employers, towns and anything else that could identify someone. An edited-out name stays in the finding’s earlier revisions.

4. 4

   Write the Insights yourself

   The conclusions are your judgement, so write or rewrite each Insight yourself, even if the assistant drafted one: what you now believe, how widely you saw it (“six of nine technicians”), and what it means for the product. Link it to each Evidence finding it rests on, by pasting the address or asking your assistant to add the links, including evidence from earlier studies. An insight with one piece of evidence is a hunch; say so.

   File what the study could not answer as a Question: those are the next study’s research questions. Mark the insights that changed a product decision as Key.

5. 5

   Let Look up become the theme map

   Keep theme names consistent: write the current list in each shelf’s notes (Offline work, End-of-day batching, Approval delays) and use them exactly. Look up (⌘K) searches every title and finding, so a theme used the same way in four studies comes back as one list.

   Search each theme every few studies. Where two names mean the same thing, “No signal” and “Offline work”, retitle the findings to one. Highlight the strongest quote in each study; the highlight shows in Look up and sets the finding’s number in bold wherever the index lists it.

6. 6

   Answer questions with Look up

   When a product manager asks “have we heard about this?”, press ⌘K and type the word. Look up shows matching index terms, documents, findings and your highlights across every shelf, with a snippet of the text in each result. When the answer needs reading rather than finding, take the question to your assistant.

   Send the product manager the quote, the participant number and the study, never the recording link unless they already have access to it.

7. 7

   Ask your assistant for patterns, then check every citation

   Ask your assistant to read across the whole library: where do participants describe working without signal, in which studies, and how many participants does each pattern rest on? It answers with citations to the findings it used.

   Open every cited finding. An assistant can count one participant twice, merge two different complaints into one pattern, or miss evidence phrased another way. When the pattern holds, write it up yourself as an Insight in a document called Themes across studies, linking the evidence from each study.