Thematic, trend and emotion analysis in the Analyze tab

The Analyze tab in each project offers a range of preset AI functions to help you synthesize your notes into actionable research. You can use these to get started and check if you’ve covered all the important points. It’s almost like having a research assistant to help you speed up insight collation.

In this article, we’ll explore when and how you should use the following types of analysis available to you:

To begin, navigate to “Analyze” in your project. Here you’ll see all notes you’ve made across all files in the project. Select the notes relevant to the report or hypothesis you’re working on. You’ll see an Ask AI bar in the toolbar*. You can ask a specific question about the notes or use these handy preset options to get started.

*the Ask AI bar will only appear after you select at least one note.

This is handy when you want to quickly extract and organize all the information in your selected notes. Marvin will consider all the note text and the corresponding clips to create the summary.

The format and kind of details will be similar to the call summaries you see for each recording. You’ll see information across files collated under headers so that it is easy to read and understand.

Consider using quick summarization when you’ve located the notes that are important to your project. Then use Marvin’s AI to structure the information in an easy-to-read format. You may end up using these summaries in your report or just to organize your data.

This function can be particularly useful when you want to uncover topics that repeat across multiple calls and files in your project. You may choose to use it to analyze usability testing calls, feedback calls, demos, etc. For example, we ran this analysis for the notes we’ve made on all Marvin webinar recordings.

Marvin’s AI was able to detect the themes that one or more of our guest speakers mentioned. It searched all the selected notes and grouped relevant information under each theme it found.

Quick thematic analysis can be a great starting point for your research. All the themes and sub-themes that Marvin identifies may become points where you want to delve deeper. You may then choose to use the Advanced thematic analysis.

Marvin will highlight how many times a theme was mentioned in your selected notes. You can open the analysis in a new tab if you want to keep referring to it. You’ll also see options here to add the analysis to an Insight report, copy the text or regenerate the analysis if you’re not happy with it.

We recommend that you check all AI generated results before presenting your research to stakeholders

The advanced version of thematic analysis goes a step further, identifying an exhaustive list of topics and adding more detail to each of them. It also lets you explore the sources used to identify each theme.

When you click “Mentioned in 12 notes” under “User-centric Approach”, you can read all the corresponding notes. Marvin also creates a graph for you to visualize the data and present it in your reports.

You may also want to stitch together multiple notes into a Playlist to make the point more comprehensive.

You can multi-select notes and add labels too. This helps come back to these notes at a later stage and use them in cross-project analysis.

While advanced thematic analysis is more detailed, you have more scope to add context when using it in a report and back up the point with data and explanations.

Marvin may take longer to generate the advanced thematic analysis. You can navigate away from the page as Marvin will also email the result to you.

You may want to use emotion analysis when you’re trying to determine user sentiment. It can be particularly handy in projects that contain surveys, and your notes on user feedback.

Marvin will scan all the information in your notes and present the sentiment in a pie chart. You can click on each segment to view the corresponding notes and also add this to an Insight report.

Marvin can use the context of your notes to detect trends early on in your project data. Trends may evolve as you add more data to the project. In contrast, themes are generally consistent and resonate with your core findings and research goals.

The AI prompts on the Analyze tab can give you extremely accurate analysis. By focussing the AI queries to a project and then on the data you chose to make notes on, you give Marvin detailed context on what you’re researching.

To make sure you always receive accurate answers, keep these best practices in mind:

Each of the analyses mentioned above focus only on the notes you make. Hence, make sure that you annotate all the important points in project files and add the right details to notes. Adding labels will add another data point to the information and make it easier for Marvin to detect patterns.

Use the filters on the Analyze tab to find the notes that are most relevant to the questions or subject you’re researching. You may not get accurate results if you include irrelevant notes.

For example, Marvin will still include all the information in a quick summary. You do not want data that does not add value to your research to be included. Or spend time exploring a theme that is from a note beyond the scope of your current report.