How to Do a Thematic

Analysis of User Interviews

BY DITTE MORTENSEN | 1 WEEK AGO | 22 MIN READ

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You have been in the field talking to users and you now find yourself with a
massive amount of audio, notes, video, pictures, and interesting
impressions. All that information can be overwhelming, and it’s difficult to
know where to start to make sense of all the data. Here, we will teach you
how to go from information chaos to patterns and themes that represent the
most interesting aspects of your data and which you can use as the
foundation for personas, user scenarios and design decisions.

When you have carried out user interviews, the next step is to analyze what
people have told you. Depending on the complexity of your project, this can
be a simple or a complex task, but no matter what your project is, it’s
important that you follow certain guidelines for how to analyze your
interviews. Although you might feel like you have a pretty good idea what
people have told you and you are eager to get started implementing your
insights, doing a proper analysis is important for the validity of your results.
There is a lot going on in an interview situation, and it’s easy to overlook
information that doesn’t fit with your preconceived assumptions of what
people were going to say and do during your interviews. A proper analysis
will ensure that you go through your data in a systematic and thorough
manner. A proper analysis also makes it easy for other people to understand
exactly how you reached your various conclusions about your participants
and will make your results much more trustworthy. Analyzing your results
takes time, especially if your purpose is broad and explorative. But if your
time is limited, it’s always better to narrow the scope of your study than to
skip steps in the analysis phase and jump straight to acting on your results.
Copyright holder: Highway Agency. Copyright terms and license: CC BY 2.0
If you find yourself with more potential roads (topics) to follow than you have
time or resources for, choose one instead of trying to cover everything.

It’s important that you properly analyze your interviews, but there is no
single right way to perform qualitative data analysis, and the method you
choose primarily depends on the actual purpose of your study. Here, we will
focus on one of the most common methods for analyzing semi-structured
interviews: thematic analysis. A thematic analysis strives to identify
patterns of themes in the interview data. One of the advantages of
thematic analysis is that it’s a flexible method which you can use both for
explorative studies, where you don’t have a clear idea of what patterns you
are searching for, as well as for more deductive studies, where you know
exactly what you are interested in. An example of an explorative study could
be conducting interviews at a technical workplace in order to obtain an
understanding of the technicians’ everyday work lives, what motivates them,
etc. A more deductive study could be conducting interviews at a technical
workplace in order to find out how technicians use a specific technology in
order to handle safety-critical situations.

No matter which type of study you are doing and for what purpose, the most
important thing in your analysis is that you respect the data and try to
represent your interview as honestly as possible. When you share your
results with others, you should be transparent about everything in your
research process, from how you recruited participants to how you performed
the analysis. This will make it easier for people to trust in the validity of your
results. People who don’t agree with your conclusion might be critical of your
research results, but if you know that you have done everything possible to
represent your participants and your research process honestly, you should
have no problem defending your results.

Steps in a Thematic Analysis

“Analysis involves a constant moving back and forward between the entire
data set, the coded extracts of data that you are analysing, and the analysis
of the data that you are producing.”

—Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, Authors and qualitative researchers in

psychology

Thematic analysis describes an iterative process as to how to go from messy

data to a map of the most important themes in the data. The process
contains six steps:

1. Familiarize yourself with your data.

2. Assign preliminary codes to your data in order to describe the content.
3. Search for patterns or themes in your codes across the different
interviews.
4. Review themes.
5. Define and name themes.
6. Produce your report.
Play
In this video, professor of Human Computer Interaction at University College
London and expert in qualitative user studies Ann Blandford provides an
overview of what an analysis process can look like.

Thematic analysis is used in many different research fields, but the steps are
always the same, and here we build our detailed description of the steps on
a famous article, by qualitative researchers in psychology Virginia Braun and
Victoria Clarke, called “Using thematic analysis in psychology”. We describe
the process as you might do it in a business setting; so, if you are conducting
interviews for academic purposes, you should look up the original article.

1.Familiarization
During the first phase, you start to familiarize yourself with your data. If you
have audio recordings, it’s often necessary to perform some form of
transcription, which will allow you to work with your data. In this phase, you
go through all your data from your entire interview and start taking notes,
and this is when you start marking preliminary ideas for codes that can
describe your content. This phase is all about getting to know your data.

How much you need to transcribe will vary depending on your project. If you
are performing a broad and exploratory analysis, you may need to transcribe
everything that was said and done during the interview, as you don’t know in
advance what you are looking for. If you are searching for specific topics, you
will probably only need to transcribe those parts of the interview that pertain
to that topic. In some cases—e.g., when the interview is a minor part of a
larger user test or observation project—writing a detailed summary or
summarizing specific themes can be sufficient. When you consider how much
to transcribe, take Braun and Clarke’s advice: “What is important is that the
transcript retains the information you need, from the verbal account, and in
a way which is ‘true’ to its original nature”.

Whether you transcribe it yourself or pay someone to do it for you will

depend on your budget and your time. Some researchers prefer to do it
themselves because they can start making sense of the data as they
transcribe; others feel as though they can use their time more efficiently by
reading the finished transcripts that someone else has made.

2.Generating Initial Codes

In phase 2, you assign codes to your data. A code is a brief description of
what is being said in the interview; so, each time you note something
interesting in your data, you write down a code. A code is a description, not
an interpretation. It’s a way to start organizing your data into meaningful
groups. As an example, let’s try to code a snippet from an interview about
video streaming:

“I: So how did you find something?

Peter: Well, first she [his wife] looked at HBO and suggested that we
watch ‘Silicon Valley’, but I’m not really into comedy shows. So, then she
went to Netflix and suggested different movies, but there wasn’t really
anything that I felt like… but then I remembered that we had been
watching ‘Better call Saul’ before the summer holiday, and I couldn’t really
remember if we had watched all the episodes, so we looked it up and it
turned out that we had stopped in the middle of the season; so, that’s what
we watched…”

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You can give this section multiple codes (and it’s perfectly fine to give one
section multiple codes) depending on your interests. If you are interested in
different streaming services, you could use the codes “Netflix” and “HBO”. If
your interests are broader or if you are—e.g.—interested in how people
collaborate, you could use the code “coming to an agreement”. So, which
codes you use depend on what is being said and on the purpose of your
research. Your coding also depends on whether you are performing an
exploratory analysis, where the themes depend on the data, or a deductive
analysis, where you search for specific themes.
Author/Copyright holder: Ditte Hvas Mortensen and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright license: CC BY-NC-
SA 3.0
How you code depends both on the data and the purpose of your research.

There is no clear cut-off between phase 1 and phase 2, and initial coding
often takes place during the familiarization phase. There is specific software
for coding, but you can also code by taking notes on a printed transcript or
by using a table in a Word document. The most important thing is that you
can match the code to the section of the interview that it refers to. Once you
have coded all your data, the next step is to collate all the sections that fit
into each code—e.g., collate all sections in your interviews with the code
“Netflix”. If you are using pen and paper, you will have to copy sections that
have multiple codes so that you can place them in more than one code
category. If you are coding digitally, you can just use copy-paste. Braun and
Clarke recommend that you code for as many potentially interesting themes
as possible and that you keep a little of the data surrounding your coded text
when you do the coding; that way, you won’t lose too much of the context.

3.Searching for themes

Author/Copyright holder: Ditte Hvas Mortensen and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright license: CC BY-
NC-SA 3.0
In phase 3, you start to sort your codes into themes.

Whereas codes identify interesting information in your data, themes are

broader and involve active interpretation of the codes and the data. You start
by looking at your list of codes and their associated extracts and then try to
collate the codes into broader themes that say something interesting about
your data. As an example, you could combine the codes “Netflix” and “HBO”
into a single theme called “Streaming services”. Searching for themes is an
iterative process where you move codes back and forth to try forming
different themes. Drawing a map of your codes and themes or having codes
on sticky notes that you can move around can help you visualize the
relationship between different codes and themes as well as the level of the
themes. Some themes might be subthemes to others. In this process, not all
codes will fit together with other codes. Some codes can become themes
themselves if they are interesting, while other codes might seem redundant,
and you can place them in a temporary mixed theme. At this point, you
shouldn’t throw away codes that don’t seem to fit anywhere, as they may be
of interest later.

4.Reviewing Themes
During phase 4, you review and refine the themes that you identified during
phase 3. You read through all the extracts related to the codes in order to
explore if they support the theme, if there are contradictions and to see if
themes overlap. In the words of Braun and Clarke, “Data within themes
should cohere together meaningfully, while there should be clear and
identifiable distinctions between themes.” If there are many contradictions
within a theme or it becomes too broad, you should consider splitting the
theme into separate themes or moving some of the codes/extracts into an
existing theme where they fit better.
Author/Copyright holder: Ditte Hvas Mortensen and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright license: CC BY-NC-SA
3.0
Some data extracts might fit into multiple themes. Here, some of the
extracts could also fit into a search theme. If you’re using pen and paper,
you must make copies of the extracts that fit into multiple themes. In this
case, you might also decide that the code called “using search” doesn’t
really fit the theme, or that you need to create a subtheme called search to
prevent your theme from becoming incoherent.

You keep doing this until you feel that you have a set of themes that are
coherent and distinctive; then you go through the same process again in
relation to your entire data set. You read through all your data again and
consider if your themes adequately represent the interesting themes in your
interview and if there is uncoded data that should be coded because it fits
into your theme. In this process, you might also discover new themes that
you have missed. Phase 4 is an iterative process, where you go back and
forth between themes, codes, and extracts until you feel that you have
coded all the relevant data and you have the right number of coherent
themes to represent your data accurately. In this iterative process, you
might feel as though you can keep perfecting your themes endlessly, so stop
when you can no longer add anything of significance to the analysis.

5.Defining and naming themes

During phase 5, you name and describe each of the themes you identified in
the previous steps. Theme names should be descriptive and (if possible)
engaging. In your description of the theme, you don’t just describe what the
theme is about, but you also describe what is interesting about the theme
and why it’s interesting. In Braun and Clarke’s words, you “define the
essence that each theme is about”. As you describe the theme, you identify
which story the theme tells and how this story relates to other themes as
well as to your overall research question. At this point in the analysis, you
should find yourself able to tell a coherent story about the theme, perhaps
with some subthemes. It should be possible for you to define what your
theme is clearly. Moreover, if you find that the theme is too diverse or
complex for you to tell a coherent story, you might need to go back to phase
4 and rework your themes.

6.Producing the report

What the final report looks like depends on your project; you might want
your final delivery to be personas or user scenarios, but there are some
commonalities you should always include. When you write up your results,
there should always be enough information about your project and process
for the reader to evaluate the quality of your research. Given that, you
should write up a clear account of what you have done – both when you
carried out the research and for your analysis. You already have a
description of your themes, and you can use this as a basis for your final
report. When you present your themes, use quotes of what the participants
said to demonstrate your findings. Video, audio and photo examples are
even more convincing, but NEVER use this without the participant’s consent.
Remember; you have been talking to these participants. To you, the
participants are real humans, each of whom has a set of views and a host of
rights you must respect. It is your job to make the participants feel real to
the people you report your findings to.

For UX projects, splitting your report up into two parts might be a good idea.
Part one contains a summary of your findings in an engaging way – this could
be in a presentation, via personas or user scenarios. Part two contains
the background information about how you did your research and your full
analysis. That way, people who are only interested in your conclusions can
stick to those while people who have questions about your research can go
to the detailed account of what your work entails. This will ensure the validity
of your research and give you a good reference for the future when you have
forgotten all the nitty-gritty details of your research project.