Patient or user involvement in health research is well-established but is often limited to advising on research questions and design, leaving researchers to collect and analyse ‘data’ (which in this paper means written copies of interviews with patients about their experiences). We were working with sets of interviews with 1) young people with depression and 2) people with experiences of stroke. We were looking for key themes that it would be useful for the NHS to know about, and we developed short films which healthcare staff can use to think about how to make care more patient-centred. We wanted to see what user involvement in this analysis would bring, and how best to achieve it practically.