
Synthesis is the process of organizing and distilling information to gain a more complete understand of your challenge. You synthesize to analyze your research for insights that inform the development of your solutions!
Effective Ways to do this include:
Synthesis techniques to gain insights:
Prepare for synthesis - Immerse 1-pagers
Download the Immerse 1-pager to prepare for your synthesis and make sure your team has the proper research to begin analyzing!
While redesigning the DFA National website, Stacy and Allison interviewed different stakeholders website and wrote down findings. They then color-coded their findings of the stakeholders’ needs and then clustered them to find similarities and common themes. This process was very helpful in creating user personas that were more based on user needs rather than demographics.
DFA UCLA's Family Driving for All Abilities team create this journey map to explain the insight that paraplegic drivers have no way to quickly get gas because they cannot call ahead for gas in the car and many existing options for help are unreliable and inconsistent.
DFA Northwestern’s Luna Lights team used this diagram to look at the relationship between the causes of falling and what leads people to change their habits. The team chose to focus on the ‘resistance to change leading to falls’ loop that they discovered as they moved to reframe and ideate.
DFA Northwestern’s Fruit Buddi team used a matrix to sort all their research. They compared what stakeholder their research was looking at vs. what location their research was done at. This helped them identify what areas in their research were worth exploring further.