How video highlight reels make stakeholders get ‘the feels’

An argument on why clipping highlight reels as a UX Researcher is the best empathy building method

A picture is worth a thousand words. A video is thousands of pictures in the form of frames (usually around 60 frames per second or more). So that means a video is worth millions of words.

As a UX Researcher (or UX’er in general), your goal is to add value to a business in the form of actionable recommendations. These recommendations are usually derived from user studies. The weight of your recommendations are tied to how it will affect the user’s experience of the product/service, which is surmised based on how you interpret the data.

But oftentimes what happens, is that you’ll be faced with skeptical stakeholders. Not everyone at your research presentation is going to automatically be onboard with your recommendations. There will inevitably be pushback, in one form or another, especially if the stakeholders aren’t totally sold on UX. More-so than that, they have their own priorities that they perceive are more important.

So not only is it your responsibility to design methodologically sound studies to gather insights from, now it’s on your shoulders to sell UX to the company and evangelize the user. There will be conflict, which means you’ll have to appear collected, while also presenting evidence to argue for your case. You can throw pass fail metrics, pain points, and other data points at stakeholders, but there can be retaliation.

Talking about user’s pain points is one thing, but showing them is another. Generally human beings feel more empathy if you show them another being suffering. Talking about the being suffering, or listing statistics about the widespread suffering is one thing, but showing them something suffering is another. The ASPCA get people to donate by showing dogs suffering. Through videos, that get at hearts. Empathy is engaged more when there is another thing to visibly emphasize with. Expanding this to users frustrations and stakeholders is not too far-fetched. When people suffer with an interface or problem in general, it’s easy to feel empathy for them when you can see it happening right in front of your face.