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How to (not) present your UX findings
Reminders of what *not* to do when you go to present your UX research results, from someone who’s done them.
It’s hard juggling a million projects all at once. Shifting release dates, prototypes that need to be tweaked, work travel sprinkled in to your packed schedule — User Experience work is highly sought after. It’s tempting to lessen the workload when it comes to how you communicate your results.
When I was starting out, I thought emailing my results would suffice. This meant that all the hours I put in to designing studies, recruiting participants, conversing with users, and scoring metric trends were rendered obsolete when I dumped them into a deck and emailed it out to the project teams. Sure, the product manager may have taken 10 minutes to read through it, but the rest of the findings were left to gather cobwebs instead of being implemented into the next product cycle. I was undermining my own work by not taking the extra time to pull together my insights in a way that communicated the full story.
Since then, I’ve learned how to tie up loose ends and share my UX findings to my partners. Here are some tips most important for presenting UX research findings, so that you don’t leave the results to fend for themselves in an inbox.
Don’t only deliver a long report
No one is going to read the whole thing if that’s the only deliverable you present. In addition to describing your detailed protocol and results, create a “one-sheeter” that pulls everything together. This way people can start with the high level results and, if they want to drill down into the details, they have the other resource to do so.
Bonus points if you include clear recommendations that are derived from these findings, and even more if you include a way to implement them. This makes your research actionable.
Don’t forget visuals
Business, technical, and managerial roles all speak a similar language. They are fluent in tracking metrics (productivity, revenue, and change) and do so in standardized ways that are called “KPI’s,” or Key Performance Indicators. The people in these roles tend to be well versed in…
