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.
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Every Insight you create is saved in a central ‘Insight repository’, 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
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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.
Using Insights in Journeys
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Insights can be used to enrich your journeys with knowledge about your customer experience. Add Insights for every step to explain the needs, pain points, etc. that customers are experiencing.
Linking (sub)insights to other insights
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You can also ‘nest’ one or multiple Insights within another Insight. Use this to add ‘factual’ insights (like quotes and observations) to an interpreted Insight (such as a need, pain point, or job). That way, you’ll be able to trace back the exact quotes and observations that your pain points, needs, etc. are based on. It also helps to empathize with customers; reading a few quotes related to a pain point will help you to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
Tip: This also means you won’t have to add separate ‘quote’ or ‘observation’ lanes to your journeys anymore; those can simply be integrated in your pains, gains, needs, etc.
Linking Insights to Opportunities
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TheyDo also allows you to ‘nest’ one or multiple Insights within an Opportunity. That way, you’ll be able to trace back the exact needs, jobs, pains or gains that an Opportunity is based on. The more Insights you link to an Opportunity, the better you’ll be able to estimate the impact they might have on the customer experience.
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.
Creating an experience curve based on Insights
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Within every Insight, you can specify the relevant personas, the experience impact, and the weight of that impact for those personas.)
The persona experience curve is automatically generated by adding up all the experience impact values and weights of all the Insights per step.
Tip: We recommend to add experience impact scores to pains and gains only. That way, your experience curve will show a representation of the sum of all pains and gains. Insights like needs or jobs don’t explain anything about the actual state of people in a moment; a need can be positive when it’s satisfied (gain), or bad when it’s not satisfied (pain). Quotes, observations, and data points can have an experience scores associated with them, but make sure to set their weight to 0 so they don’t override the scores of pains and gains.
How Insights help you go from raw data to Opportunities
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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.
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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.
The benefits of working with Insights
Mapping Insights in this way in TheyDo helps you to do several things:
Open up all available customer Insights to anyone in the organization. By breaking down your research into bite-sized information nuggets in TheyDo, you make them available for anyone else to use. Think of your Insight repository as a centralized, easy-to-navigate digital filing system. TheyDo’s search functionality replaces the manual process of trawling through years of archived reports and files siloed throughout an organization. It helps you to easily rediscover past facts and insights. As a result, knowledge can become evergreen – no research is forgotten, and no relevant research goes to waste. Your Insights continue to add value long after the research has concluded. It can be used by researchers, product designers, product managers, marketers, and many other functions across the business.
Standardize your research building blocks. By specifying your Insight types, you ensure that everyone in your organization uses the same structure for capturing insights.
Systematically build up your research analysis: Insights help you to record, categorize, and analyze your data in a systematic way. This helps you to notice the right patterns and ensures you don’t overlook important details or draw incorrect conclusions.
Explain Opportunities and Solutions in an evidence-based way. Insights also work the other way around, helping you drill down from Opportunities to the Insights and facts that underpin them. This helps you to better understand and explain their relevance. Further options like Insight statuses, dependability scores, and linking data sources make any Insight’s trustworthiness completely transparent.
Better prioritize Opportunities and Solutions. The more Insights that you connect to an Opportunity or Solution, the better you’ll be able to estimate their value. This helps a great deal when prioritizing them.
Insights in the triple diamond process
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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
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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.
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