What are Insights?
)
Learn how Insights help you to capture and organize customer knowledge in TheyDo.
Insights are the main building blocks for capturing and organizing qualitative customer knowledge in TheyDo. Insights help you to break down customer research into bite-sized information ‘nuggets’. Like lego blocks, you can connect any Insight to Journeys, Opportunities, or even another Insight.
Every Insight you create is saved in a central ‘Insight library’, and can be reused (linked) across multiple Journeys and Opportunities. When you update an Insight in one place, it will be updated everywhere else as well, preventing double work. The Insight repository can be used by anyone in the organization, is easily searchable, and can capture all customer insights across the organization. This replaces the need to manually trawl through years of reports and files scattered across the organization.
Insight cards can be used to capture qualitative data. For capturing quantitative data, use Metrics instead.
Use a wide range of Insight types
)
You can create many types of Insights. Commonly used types include:
● Activities: The activities customers undertake in order to accomplish their goals.
● Jobs or Needs: The goals customers are trying to accomplish, or the needs they are trying to satisfy
● Pains: The barriers or obstacles that prevent customers from achieving their jobs or satisfying their needs
● Gains: The benefits or positives that help customers achieve their jobs or satisfying their needs.
● Quotes: Literal comments made by participants in a research study.
● Observations: Observed user behaviors and interactions with a product or service.
● Trends: Patterns or developments observed across a large group of customers, market, or industry over a period of time.
Simply assign a ‘type’ to categorize an Insight. The type will show as a label on the Insight card. For a deeper exploration and examples of these types, have a look at our detailed guide on Insight types.
Tip: Every organization is free to define their own Insight types by setting up a custom Taxonomy. You might find other types of Insights in your workspace based on the Taxonomy defined there.
Add Insights to many elements in TheyDo
Insights can be linked to Journeys, Opportunities, and even other Insights.
Connecting Insights to their supporting evidence
Insights can also be linked back to the raw research output they are ‘extracted’ from (like interview transcripts, surveys, etc.) by including links to these sources in the descriptions of your Insights. This enables you to trace back where your Insights originated from.
How Insights help you go from raw data to Opportunities
)
Using Insights enables you to create a structured, evidence-based buildup of your Opportunities. This buildup can be broken down into four layers of information, where each new layer builds on the previous one:
Research output: Raw research output like survey data, dashboards, or interview transcripts. This is not stored in TheyDo itself, but forms the basis for the Insights you create in TheyDo.
Factual Insights: Facts like observations, quotes, or data points that are ‘extracted’ from your raw research output. This forms a core, ‘factual’ layer of Insights in TheyDo that is backed by evidence.
Interpreted Insights: Interpretations of the facts, like jobs, pains, or gains. Multiple factual Insights can be ‘nested’ or ‘grouped’ within an Interpreted Insight.
Opportunities: Opportunities for improvement based on your interpretations of the current situation. Multiple Insights can be nested within Opportunities.
These layers are often referred to as the ‘data’, ‘information’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘wisdom’ (DIKW) layers in design thinking and knowledge management theory. The buildups of these layers are often referred to as DIKW-Pyramids, Insight Pyramids, or Information Hierarchy. They also form the basis for ‘Atomic Research’. With the introduction of Insight, all of these methodologies are now fully supported within TheyDo.
)
In this way of working, a single Opportunity can be based on several interpreted Insights (such as a few pain points or needs), and each of those can be supported by several factual insights (like quotes or observations.) The other way around also works: a single fact (such as an observation) can be interpreted in multiple ways, resulting in multiple interpreted Insights (such as pain points or needs). One of those interpreted insights can also result in multiple opportunities. Opportunities often result in multiple possible Solutions.
Insights in the triple diamond process
)
Insights play the most prominent role in the first diamond. This is where you collect customer Insights, organize them into Journeys, and cluster them into Opportunities. Although this is where you will create most of your Insights, they will help inform your decision making throughout every step of the triple diamond.
Insights in the journey hierarchy
)
Insights form the foundational layer of customer knowledge in TheyDo, that support all other entities used in TheyDo. They can be used to enrich Journeys, Opportunities.