The purpose of this research was to assess in what ways people's eating habits have been impacted by changes in their work and life routines due to Covid-19. I wrote some research objectives to help me make that assessment.

Research objectives
• Were users able to maintain their dietary habits? What changes have they experienced in their dietary habits over the last 2 years?
• Where do users spend most of their money on food during the pandemic? What foods are they eating?
• How has Covid-19 impacted snacking habits or eating for reasons outside of hunger? How has it affected users’ relationship with food?

I let these objectives guide the rest of the research - from writing the interview guide, to the synthesis and insight forming at the end.
‍

I used qualitative user interviews for this research. I conducted five 20-30 minute virtual interviews with five different participants. Interviews were chosen as the primary methodology because I wanted to tap into the user's experience in their words - and understand better how they perceived changes in their habits over the last 2 years.

Participants
I asked my very gracious family and friends to participate in this research, and they kindly obliged!

The target participants: People whose work situation had been fundamentally impacted by Covid. This meant people who had lost their employment due to Covid, or had their work life changed dramatically - for example, moving from an office to working from home. These were people who were now spending a significant amount of time at home, what did that mean for meals and routines?

All 5 participants in the study fit our target profile - they had all, in some way, had their employment impacted by Covid-19. Some lost jobs, some moved from a full time office position to remote work, and some left their jobs due to new challenges presented by the pandemic.
‍

I transcribed and edited all the interviews, and coded them using these groups:

I wanted to understand my participants better - better understand their behaviors, and their feelings about those behaviors. That's why I chose these particular groupings. I went through the transcribed interviews, and used the color coding you see up there to mark up the text by group.

After that it was time to pull out the virtual stickies! I started to affinity map out all the coded quotes I had highlighted. First I organized them by user and coding group, then within each coding group, I started matching up similar responses from different participants, and giving those similar responses a category name.

My goal was to move from the more highly specific details, to general insights that could both speak to the research objectives, and that I felt could lead to actionable recommendations. The organization never stops. I organized the categories, then put similar categories into buckets with a general theme that kept popping up in the responses.

I looked at the themes that appeared from my new buckets, and from there discovered the insights I would present.