Context

Something's up with Aperture Labs' new phone, and user researcher Dottie's on the case. Armed with 100 escalated support ticket conversations from across the globe—half from North America, half from APAC—she's digging in to find out exactly what's going wrong with the hardware.

Mapping the problem space

Since Dottie doesn't know what's buried in those 100 conversations yet, she starts broad. She creates two high-level theme groups—hardware and software—each with two general themes, giving her a bird's-eye view of what categories of problems customers are running into.

General theme groups hierarchy showing Hardware and Software categories — General themes to categorize phone issues

One theme jumps out: Camera Hardware accounts for 42.8% (122 labels) of all labels.

Bar chart showing label counts for general issues — Total label count of general themes

Zooming in on camera problems

Dottie does her homework—reviewing field reports and checking in with customer success—then creates five new themes around the most common camera issues. Each one includes a full description and examples to keep the labels accurate.

For example, here's the details for theme Focus Failure:

Theme details view showing description and examples for Focus Failure — Theme definition with examples

Dottie runs the five camera themes against her dataset. Focus Failure takes the lead in total labeled moments.

Bar chart showing Focus Issues as the top category — Total label count of camera specific issues

Finding patterns across camera themes

Next, Dottie looks at distribution correlation to see what other themes tend to appear alongside focus issues and how consistently they do so.

Insight 1: Focus Failure has above average correlation (0.635) with Overheating During Video.

Correlation graph showing Focus Failure linked to Overheating Video (0.635) — Focus failure ↔ Overheating Video (0.635 correlation)

Mousing over the other camera themes, Dottie finds something worth a closer look.

Insight 2: Slow Shutter/Lag correlates strongly (0.8) with Low Light Performance and above average (0.592) with Image Quality Issues. This points to a new camera problem—one unrelated to Focus Failures.

Correlation graph for Slow Shutter showing links to Low Light (0.8) and Image Quality (0.592) — Slow Shutter/Lag correlations

Segmenting by region

Dottie wonders if region plays a role. She segments the dataset by NA vs. APAC to see if the correlation holds up or shifts.

Filter bar showing APAC region selected — Filtering by APAC region

Insight 3: Focus Failure and Overheating During Video correlate at 0.909 in APAC—a big jump from the 0.635 overall. Slicing by region revealed a much stronger connection, suggesting this is an APAC-specific problem.

Strong correlation between Focus and Overheating in APAC — APAC: Strong correlation between focus and overheating

North America shows a different story.

Insight 4: NA's top three correlations are between Image Quality Issues, Slow Shutter/Lag, and Low Light Performance—no focus problems in sight. The data suggests the two regions may be dealing with entirely different camera issues.

NA region filter showing different correlation cluster — Top 3 correlations in NA region: Slow shutter/lag ↔ Low Light Performance ↔ Image Quality Issues

Of course, support conversations are just one piece of the puzzle. To verify what she's found, Dottie should cross-reference these insights with hardware telemetry logs, check warranty claim data by region, or sit down with the engineering team to see if the patterns match what they're seeing in the field.