Synthesizing field data into well-articulated, data-driven patterns, themes, and opportunities is a big part of our work, but it’s an aspect that generally has less visibility than the fieldwork.

An essential early step in the synthesis process involves going back over the fieldwork sessions. An hour or two-hour interview creates an incredible amount of information. By going back into a record of the interview, we make sure not to leave anything significant behind.

We go through and make notes on interview transcripts (done by an outside service), watch videos of the sessions, and look over photographs, sketches, maps, and participatory design pieces.

Annotated interview transcript

We made a bulletin board of the people we met, so they’re ever-present while we’re working.

Yesterday we came together to share the points we’d each pulled out. We present each interview, like a case study, to the team. Sometimes it’s just us, and sometimes our clients join us for part of this process.

While one of us presented, the other captured the essence onto Post-its. We had a lot of discussion and debate while we did this, pulling together multiple viewpoints.

When we were done presenting the interviews, the board looked like this:

Our next step is to take these notes and start grouping them. We’ll look at different ways the information can be organized, and from there, will start refining our work and writing it up clearly and succinctly into a report.

As soon as possible after concluding fieldwork, we write a Topline Summary, in which we capture our first impressions and the ideas that are top-of-mind from being in the field.

We’re always careful to be clear about what the Topline is and isn’t. There’s synthesis that happens from the fieldwork experience itself (which the Topline captures), and synthesis that happens from working with the data (which we haven’t done yet).

In the Topline we go a step further than the field highlights and start to articulate some of the patterns we think are emerging, but these ideas may change once we do a detailed analysis and synthesis of the data we’ve gathered.

In a client project, we’ll have a discussion with the client team around the Topline Summary. We encourage members of the client team to come out in the field with us, and the Topline discussion is a great opportunity for everyone who did so to share their experiences and tell stories. The Topline discussion is also a good time for our clients to let us know if there are any specific directions they want us to pursue as we analyze and synthesize the data we’ve gathered.

We’ve now finished our fieldwork for Reading Ahead. We conducted six in-depth interviews, with photo diary and participatory design activities (more in our next few posts about these methods).

Here’s our Topline Summary:

Portigal Consulting: Reading Ahead Topline Summary

1. Reading is not just a solo activity; there are significant social/interpersonal aspects for many people

• Recommendations, book clubs, lending

• Books facilitate the interpersonal aspects of reading

  Can be easily lent or given away
  

  Given as gifts
  

  People can use a book together: parents and kids, showing someone a passage or illustrations, etc.

• Reading can be a big part of family life
  

  Childhood memories, passing books between generations, reading with one’s own children.

  Connection between home life and outside world (school)

2. Reading and Books are not always one and the same

• Erica buys some books because she likes them as objects. She knows she may not read all of them. “I love books. I almost like books more than reading.”

• Jeff says if you love to read, you’d like the Kindle. If you love books, you should try it out before you buy one

• The Kindle facilitates types of reading beyond books: blogs, articles, periodicals

3. Books do more than carry content

• Books engage the senses: they are tactile, visual objects, with specific characteristics like smell and weight
  

  Become carriers of specific memories

  Develop a patina that carries meaning

  An inscribed book becomes a record of an event, interaction, relationship

• There is an art/collector aspect to books (which is absent in the Kindle)
  

  First editions

  Signed copies

  Galley proofs

  Typography

  Pictures and illustrations

  Quality of paper, printing, etc.

• Books say something about a person
  

  Others can see what you’re reading; like clothes, etc., this carries meaning

  “Looking at someone’s bookshelves when you go to their house” (Jeff)

  When people give books as gifts they are deliberately communicating something about the relationship, the event, themselves, and the recipient

• Books can create a physical record of someone’s reading activity
  

  Chris used to line up all the books he had read to get a sense of accomplishment

  Annotations, bookmarks, tags all convey the reader’s personal history with that book

4. Books are easily shared

• Pass them along to others

• Donate to library

• Sell or buy at used book store

• Borrow from the library rather than purchasing
  

5. How books are stored and organized carries meaning

• Emotion, sense of pride, expression of personality, record of engagement

• Erica organizes her books by how the content/type of book feels to her: “dusty” classics, modern classics, etc.

• Julie’s extensive shelves are organized alphabetically to reinforce the idea of library
  

6. Libraries and bookstores provide specific experiences

• As a little girl, Erica visited different libraries with her Mom. This was their daily activity, and Erica retains strong and specific memories

• Julie and her housemate recreated a library atmosphere in their home

  A quiet, comfortable space

  Good lighting

  Alphabetized bookshelves

  A unified décor

• For Jeff and others, spending time browsing in a bookstore represents having leisure time
  

7. The Kindle

• For people whose love of reading is bound up in their love of books, the Kindle loses much of the reading experience; it is only a content carrier

• Julie has a history of wanting to read on electronic devices as well as from printed books, so to her, the Kindle is a big evolutionary step from her old Palm, the iPhone, etc.

• For Erica, the Kindle signifies “computer,” so it does not let her “unplug” from the fast-paced connected lifestyle that books provide a refuge from

• Several people described the kinetics of page-turning as an important aspect of reading books that is absent in the Kindle

• Books afford ways of navigating content that the Kindle does not: flipping, comparing non-sequential pages, looking at the recipes at the end of each chapter, etc.

• Peter finds it frustrating that when he buys a Kindle book from Amazon, he can’t share it. When he started working in an environment where people were passing books around, he went back to reading printed books
  

8. Participant ideation about the “book of the future” and “reading device of the future”

• NOTE: The first thing a number of the participants said when asked about what the “book of the future” could be and do was that it’s pretty hard to improve on the book-it works very well the way it is. In addition to all the qualities already mentioned, books are
  

  Instant on-off
  

  Durable

  But people did have ideas. Here are some of them:

• Interactive
  

  Put yourself in the story

  Leave the story for more information

  Choose from alternate endings, versions

• Size-shifting

  Able to morph from bigger size for reading to smaller for transporting

• Retain the book form while adding functionality

  Book form with replaceable content: a merging of book and device, with a cover, and page-turning but content is not fixed-it can be many different books

  Books that contain hyperlinks, electronic annotations, multimedia, etc.

• Privacy

  Hide what you’re reading from others, hide annotations, hide your personal book list and lend your device to someone (with content for them)

• Projecting

  A device that projects words that float above it, so that the reader doesn’t have to hold the device in their hands

During the fieldwork cycle, we write quick summaries of each interview session and send these immediately to our clients so they can start to circulate stories. At this point in the process we strive to stay descriptive; our goal is just to get stories about the people we’re meeting out to the extended team (us, our direct clients, and their stakeholders).

Our interview with Julie (not her real name) was the last session in the fieldwork for this project.

Julie and her housemate have an amazing library in their San Leandro home, with three walls of alphabetized floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. With the bookshelves and quiet ambiance of the space, being in this part of their home feels just like being a library.

The whole downstairs of their house has been optimized for reading; they have great lighting, and comfortable sofas big enough for two people to stretch out on simultaneously.

Of the six people we met, Julie was the person who most seemed to have integrated printed book and Kindle reading. For Julie, reading a book and reading on the Kindle are both equally positive experiences; in fact, she will sometimes go back and forth between a printed book and the Kindle version of the same book, depending on whether she is at home, traveling, etc.

While some of the people we met described the Kindle as less-than-satisfying compared to a printed book, Julie has a long history of reading on electronic devices, and finds the Kindle a big step forward.

In the following clip, Julie talks about how her electronic reading has evolved, from her first Palm Pilot up to her current Kindle 2: