How rainbow clusters of sticky notes can inform customer-centric innovation

Experts in User Experience Design (UXD) have matured their industry into a science. Industry leaders like Nielsen Norman Group have published incredibly rich and detailed guidelines for user empathy interview analysis [1] to ensure customer feedback is leveraged as data-rich sources of information to product backlogs.

Smaller teams often miss out on those valuable UX research insights. So, what should they do when they can't afford to hire a UX researcher or train an employee in these rich methodologies? The secret: rainbow clusters of sticky notes.

To put the customer experience first, we start by talking with customers. With detailed notes taken throughout the interviews and by referencing recordings and transcripts of the interviews, we can generate a full whiteboard (real or virtual) of quotes from the interviews. When each customer’s interview is captured on a different color sticky note, any common trends across the various experiences will reveal themselves in a rainbow cluster.

Here is the full step-by-step process:

1. Conduct your interviews.
Choose as many participants as you need to fully represent all types of target users of your product. In the early stages of innovating your product, keep your interviews focused on their actual experiences instead of “what ifs” or solutions.

2. Capture observations and quotes.
Transfer notes and transcripts to sticky notes on a wall or whiteboard using one color sticky note per interviewee. At this step, the only things written down should be direct quotes or objective observations – no interpretations of body language, naming of feelings or interpretations of emotions. If you’re working in a distributed team, tools like Miro, Confluence whiteboards (pictured below), FigJam and Lucidchart are good virtual tools for this exercise.

3. Group the observations and quotes into common themes.
At this step, you can let groups of sticky notes evolve into a theme that reflects some interpretation or inductive reasoning applied to the objective quotes and observations. For example, four interviewees who smiled and leaned in when asked the same question about how their experience is when seeking customer support could be grouped into a theme of “positive body language about customer service.” Three interviewees who used words like “painful,” “hard,” “difficult” or “I felt clueless” when asked about finding a specific piece of information should be grouped into a theme about negative feelings around finding that information.