How to share your UX research

Tips for making reports your colleagues will actually read

School has taught us to measure a report’s value by its length. We’re all familiar with word counts, and padding out our sentences to hit that arbitrary target. Or bumping up the font size to increase the page count.

As adults, we know that writing this way is silly. We make things as short or as long as they need to be to say what we need to say. From emails to wiki pages, we’re all used to writing long-form content in our workplaces. For UX researchers, reports are a big part of our toolkit.

Why do user researchers write reports?

After we go through a phase of research, we need a way to share the findings with our team. Since we collect so much helpful data in one test, a research report is a nice way for us to share results in full detail.

There are a few reasons for this:

• The results can be used to guide future product decisions, and build things that customers will find helpful
• It gives your team an opportunity to empathise with their customers
• Over time, they’ll prove the value of getting early feedback from customers

Reports contain a rich variety of information. They’re heavy on the text, and often use diagrams and tables of data to explain things. If your research involved speaking to customers (or test participants) then there may even be video clips of them talking about or using the product.

Writing these reports can be tricky. Here are some of the things I’ve learned over my career to improve the quality of my user research reports.

Remember your audience

As a researcher, your stakeholders are the other people in your organisation. In a sense, they are your users. The information in your report should fit their needs. Knowing how other people work means you can create reports that they’ll find helpful and relevant.

For example, the designer who built the prototype you ran the tests with will want to see the full results. However, someone working in sales may be more interested in how your research affects the product…