Interviewing 40 academic and professional services staff about profiles not only revealed insights from staff about their own profiles, but also viewpoints from staff involved in coordinating and utilising profile content. This blog post recounts the process to synthesis and analyse staff interview data to surface these different perspectives and understand associated needs and requirements.

The Role of Profiles project set out to identify ways to improve the provision for online profiles by learning what staff needed from profiles.

Read more about the project in the related blog post:

The Role of Profiles: our new project researching needs and potential for online profiles

Forty staff in a variety of roles, from a range of disciplines and from different sectors of the University were interviewed for the project. Thorough synthesis of the interview data, and a combination of thematic and narrative analysis identified three perspectives from those engaged with profiles:

• Profile owners – the subjects of the profiles
• Profile coordinators – those who oversee profiles
• Profile consumers – those who extract information from profiles

This blog post describes more about each of these perspectives and how they emerged from the interview data through the different stages of synthesis and analysis.

Interview transcripts were processed into extracts which were grouped into themes

Each staff interview was recorded and therefore came with a full transcript. In some cases, members of the UX team (the interviewers) found it helpful to annotate transcripts with supplementary observations and reflections from the interview.

The first stage of the data synthesis involved extracting points from the transcripts and accompanying notes and transferring these onto individual post-it notes, each tagged with details of the interviewees’ College or Group and their role type (professional services or academic). Over multiple sessions, the UX team reviewed the collective extracts and sorted them into themes which addressed the project research questions in a deductive analysis process. Themes included the following:

• Purposes and functions of profiles
• Profile content
• Audiences of profiles
• Profile lifecycle processes (creating, maintaining and deleting profiles)
• Experiences of current EdWeb profiles

Reviewing the interview data revealed multiple, rich layers of insights

In the course of this first part of the analysis, it became clear that the interview data was a very rich source, with much to be learned and deduced beyond the themes identified.

In the book ‘Time to Listen: How Giving People Space to Speak Drives Invention and Inclusion’ author Indi Young sets out four different layers of information that can come from a one-to-one conversation with someone. This construct was helpful to categorise the different types of insight obtained from the interviews with staff:

1.      Description layer insights (facts, scene-setting, explanations)

• Practical step-by-step details describing how profiles are initiated and managed day-to-day
• Actions staff take relating to profiles (for example sharing them, adding and editing content)
• Tangible information sources associated with profiles (for example: source databases and repositories, instruction documents, guidance hubs)
• Descriptions of where profiles fit into specific contexts (what their role and purpose is, how they are used)

2.      Expression layer insights (opinions, preferences)

• Ideas about what profiles should be like and how they should work (look, feel, operation, management)

3.      Almost cognition layer information (generalisations, imagined futures)

• Ideas for features, mechanisms and processes for profiles
• Extrapolation of individual circumstances and contexts to the wider University (suggesting wider adoption of localised practices or individual practices)

4.      Interior cognition insights (values, emotions, guiding principles)

• Drivers and motivations behind current actions and practices relating to profiles
• Underlying reasons for doing things in certain ways in specific contexts relating to profiles
• Beliefs about overarching purpose of University profiles – why they should or shouldn’t exist

Individual transcripts were then reviewed for narrative analysis

Being mindful of these types of insight, in the next stage of the analysis it was necessary to adopt a different view, and to consider each of the 40 interview transcripts separately. This enabled an appreciation of the perspectives of individual University staff on profiles, based on their specific job roles, responsibilities and contexts in the narratives shared in each interview.

Profile-owner, profile-coordinator and profile-consumer perspectives emerged

All interviews began by engaging the individual staff member about their own online profiles or lack thereof, (whether this was on the University website or not). As well as speaking about their own online profile presence, several staff spoke about other aspects of profiles, for example: How they worked with colleagues to prepare and manage online profiles in their School or business unit and the ways they used University colleagues’ profiles within their work. Three perspectives emerged, the profile owner, profile coordinator and profile consumer.

Profile owners

Staff adopting the profile owner perspective gave insights about their own profiles. Profile owners spoke about:

• Why their profiles were important or unimportant to them
• How they wanted their individual profiles to look
• The content they wanted them to include
• The effort they put into updating them
• How they shared and disseminated them
• The audiences they shared them with
• How their profiles fitted into their overall online presence

Profile coordinators

Staff recounting the profile coordinator perspective had had experience looking after profiles of other people in their School or business unit. Profile coordinators spoke about:

• Establishing a consistent look and feel to profiles in a particular School or business unit
• Setting up web pages to arrange groups of profiles together (in directories or lists)
• Helping other staff update and maintain their profiles
• Deciding whether profiles needed to be internally or externally facing
• Guidance and training provided to staff to help them look after their profiles
• The end-to-end process (or lifecycle) of profiles, from creation to deletion

Profile consumers

Staff sharing the profile consumer perspective had had experience of finding and making use of content within other peoples’ profiles. Profile consumers spoke about:

• Searching for profile information on named individuals
• Tracking down people with expertise in certain areas using information in profiles
• Collating disparate pieces of profile information about individuals to build a bigger picture
• Identifying groups of people with a shared working purpose through their profiles
• Finding the right staff members to answer external enquiries

Being mindful of the interplay between the three perspectives helped build a fuller appreciation of the needs and requirements for online profiles. An improved provision would need to strike a balance between the needs of all three profile stakeholders, which may in turn vary according to the context of the School or business unit they worked in.

Read more about the perspectives of the three profile stakeholders in the accompanying blog posts:

Establishing my position, my role and my association with the University: What staff told us about the importance, purpose and function of their online profiles

Representing myself online: Staff preferences and practices for content within online profiles

Keeping profiles up-to-date: Practices and processes for managing the end-to-end lifecycle of staff profiles