Communicating user research learnings is a storytelling exercise
Don’t stress about the format — focus on your narrative.
Reports or slides?
Comics or research museums?
Gifs or infographics?
The web is awash with suggestions on the many formats a researcher can choose from when the time comes to communicate their research learnings. The goal is always to engage your team and stakeholders, the assumption being that one format will capture their attention better than another.
But here’s the thing — when we plan a piece of research, our choice of research method is informed by the learning goal and hypotheses. In other words, first we make sure we’re clear on what we want to find. Then we decide how to go about finding it out in the most appropriate way.
The same applies to sharing user research learnings — the story of what you want to communicate should come before how you decide to communicate it. The story is the thing that will engage your audience first and foremost.
Many articles with great ideas on presentation formats are already available on Medium and beyond, so I’m here to focus on the step that comes before — namely, the importance of a narrative when communicating user research learnings.
Get the key messages right
It was in my first week as a journalism student when I got the sobering revelation that writing class will not be about punchy opinion pieces and 10,000-word investigations into fascinating subjects. Instead it turned out that our youthful enthusiasm will be channeled into turning two-page Met Police press releases into 50-word news articles. All while being timed by the professor.
Developing the skill to instantly identify the who, what, where, when and why of a story and honing the ability to weigh the importance of each W in order to eliminate inconsequential information took hours of practice.
That’s why, when faced with dozens of pages of interview notes and scribbles in the margins of your discussion guide, it’s imperative to recognize the skeleton of your research learnings story and convey this “news” clearly — whatever sharing format you choose to use in the end.
So don’t retell all the feedback participants gave on Prototype A. Repeating stuff as it happened doesn’t make for an engaging or actionable learnings synthesys. Instead, identify the key themes that form a story which is easier to process and buy your audience into the narrative.
After all, communicating research learnings is really about communicating the story that improves your team’s understanding of a problem and unblocks further actions, whether these actions are more research, data experiments or straight up development.
Which leads me to…
Don’t be afraid to leave stuff out
So a research participant said something so quotable you’ve already got a plain white t-shirt ready to print it on. It’s not at all related to the learning goal of this research and, to be honest, it was also mostly influenced by this other thing that happened in the interview but it’s definitely something people will remember so let’s tell them about it!
Just because it happened, doesn’t mean it’s important. Just because it’s insight, doesn’t mean it’s insightful.
When you’re communicating user research learnings, you’re dealing with people’s limited attention spans, memory capacity and bias towards hearing the stuff they want to hear.
Does everything need to be part of the story? Does everything inform the team’s understanding of the problem at hand? Does everything move your work forward? Does everything add value?
I’m willing to bet the answer is no.
Worse, you’re running the risk of introducing information that can muddy the waters and distract from really important learnings.
Being selective in what you include in the story isn’t equivalent to being dishonest. Similarly, retelling hours of interviews isn’t the equivalent of being meticulous.
Prioritise your core audience
I’m saying “core audience” instead of just “audience” on purpose.
As researchers, we’re always concerned with bringing our users to the widest possible audience. We want to engage the whole company. We want to get everyone to put themselves in our customers’ shoes.
But whose work is currently relying on the learnings of this research to inform further actions and decisions?
That’s your core audience.
Do you know who are the top people who need to not only hear but understand the learnings from this research? Do you know how they consume information and what they need in order to do their job?
Craft your story — and subsequently the format you present it in — for them.
If there was official data on the subject, I’m confident the most often heard complaint amongst user researchers would be lack of time to do #allofthethings and to do them at pace.
Prioritising your story for your core audience over “everyone” is crucial to balancing time constraints and effectiveness, and consequently working towards great outcomes over great-looking outputs.
A clear research learnings story empowers empathy
The question of time, and just how insufficient it always seems to be, is also behind the often heard aim of doing research “quick and dirty”.
By all means, the pace and process of pure academic research is not appropriate in a product/ business environment. User research has to be agile and quick-moving.
However, you empathised with your users when you planned your research. You empathised with your users when you conducted your research. You empathised with your users when you analysed your findings.
Your challenge is to pass on this empathy to people who haven’t lived and breathed this research as you have.
The power of storytelling is the way to build this bridge.
It’s worth putting in the effort into creating a story out of the empathetic insight you’ve collected — it will make your stakeholders really relate and connect with the problem at hand and they will in turn feel inspired and empowered to put in the effort into translating it into a great solution, guaranteed.
—
I often think of the opening line of Joan Didion’s “The White Album”: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Just as literature is an enabler for living a multitude of human experiences from the comfort of an armchair, user research is an enabler for empathetic, informed, customer-centric product decisions from the comfort of a, ummm, meeting room (just go with it).
User research success isn’t measured by the presentation of the insight we’ve gathered but by the usage and customer satisfaction of the products and services we end up building as a result of this insight.
User research outputs are only as good as the outcomes they drive. Investing effort and thinking behind crafting compelling stories out of your research learnings is what will bring your team closer to creating the products your customers will love.
Thanks for reading my first attempt at a Medium article! Applause if you enjoyed it, and share your thoughts and experience on effectively communicating user research learnings in the comments :)
