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I would like to create my own persona(s) for my research. While due to some limitations, I don't do any formal user interview or observations myself. What I have as resources are the user research which have been done by another research team in the company. I have currently four different sources of user research materials. Mostly, they did user interviews and observations. they also did usability testing for one particular product following certain kind of scenario.

My objective of this research is to identify the users' expectations, their pain points and their common points.

Could you give me some advice about how can I use the existing research?

*The existing research focused on the similar user types with mine. Therefore, I think that I could reuse their raw data to re-analyse and construct my persona(s)

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  • Do you have access to the transcripts/recordings or just the findings?
    – Andre Dickson
    Commented Oct 5, 2016 at 19:27
  • Hello, I have certain moderator scripts for only 2 researches, for the rest I have only the findings. Do you have some suggestions?
    – Lingxue Yang
    Commented Oct 6, 2016 at 13:07
  • Do you have the actual responses participants gave in the interviews?
    – Andre Dickson
    Commented Oct 6, 2016 at 13:20
  • For one, I only have the notes that the note taker wrote during the usability testing. What I have for all the researches they have done is their reports and presentation based on their analysis. But for the raw data, I don't have.
    – Lingxue Yang
    Commented Oct 6, 2016 at 16:30

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In instances of this nature, you need to extract what the findings were into a format that can be easily reviewed. When you have a persona and various pages/summaries of research findings it can be a bit overwhelming to see where consistencies remain...and where to begin. Similar to how content writers are told to "chunk" their content so it can be consumed easier, you need to do this with your research as well.

I prefer using a simple spreadsheet to map out my findings, and from there I identify what the commonalities are. Here's an example of that:

Research Matrix

I call this a Research Matrix. It allows me to essentially aggregate existing research into a format that chunks my findings. From there I create a hierarchy of priorities based on the prevalence of certain findings. In some instances ill even color-code the spreadsheet so I can point out pain points (in red), wants and needs (green/yellow), etc.

Hope this helps.

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  • Hi Seth, thanks very much for your answer. That's very helpful.
    – Lingxue Yang
    Commented Oct 5, 2016 at 13:47
  • I have already build my spreadsheet listing the objective of the four research, their target users, method, findings, etc. While I still have a question about how to compare these four? It seems to me a litte ambiguous. I know that they have similar users, but the methods they used are different. Due to their different objectives, their results are be also different. How can I make sure these diffent researches can be combine into one research of mine? Do you have some suggestions?
    – Lingxue Yang
    Commented Oct 5, 2016 at 14:01

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