Synthesis & Clustering

Synthesis turns research data into digestible patterns. Start by extracting behaviors, motivations, and constraints from your data and using clustering to identify personas.

Common approaches

• Affinity mapping: group quotes and evidence on a board
• Quantitative clustering: use analytics or survey data for behavioral buckets
• Hybrid method: annotate data, then run clustering and iterate

Practical exercise

• Create an affinity map with 20–50 research notes and identify 3–5 clusters.
• For each cluster, write a one-sentence archetype label.

Avoid these mistakes

• Designing personas from a single interview
• Mixing demographic-based segments with behavioral segments indiscriminately