"Informative insights
Informative insights help us learn about something or someone and don’t result in immediate action. Instead, these insights help build knowledge about our users, industry, competitors, and so on. For example:
- Most developers who took part in the survey were first introduced to GitLab while they were in school.
Actionable insights
Actionable insights always have a follow-up action that needs to take place as a result of the research observation or data, and a clear recommendation or action associated with it. An actionable insight both defines the insight and clearly calls out the next step. For example:
Users weren't able to submit a merge request in the proposed design because they couldn't find the “Submit” button. They expected it to be located at the top of the page. Action: Iterate on the design to relocate the 'Submit' button to the top of the page and retest (link to Issue # XYZ)."
"While capturing your research data, you'll focus on documenting observations (what you saw the user do, or what problems you saw/heard them experience) and quotes (the verbatim of what the user actually said, in quotation marks). You may also want to make notes on early interpretations (what you believe something a user said or did means) and possible solutions (concrete ways to solve the problems identified)."
Insights Checklist
Documenting research findings
"The UX Research team has always faced challenges in finding the best way to create research reports that are easy to digest and access. When using methods such as PDFs, Google docs, and even GitLab CE issues themselves, it was difficult to track and share study findings. Additionally, since we are often asked to readily recall information we've learned in prior studies (…) The goal of Dovetail is to make research findings searchable, concise, and easy to reference."