The forgotten step where even brilliant research fails (or makes you invaluable)
How to make your research more impactful without creating extra work for your team.
Each and every step of the User Research process is crucial to a great result, I don’t deny that. But while failing to complete each step can have consequences, the most detrimental misstep can actually occur at the end. This is where even the most experienced researchers sometimes drop the ball unintentionally, making the entire research project worthless by not sharing their research well.
I don’t mean to say that a terribly run series of interviews can be saved if the end is done properly. But a flawlessly implemented study can still go wrong in the very last step if we don’t give enough attention to sharing our research results.
How the final step ruins research
Sharing insights should be as high on a list of priorities as properly screening for the right participants, taking accurate notes, and checking the reliability of the data.
This final step is too often where potentially impactful research ends up in a folder no one ever opens again. No matter how great the study may have been, if no one learns from it, it might as well have never been done.
As a consultant, I have the exciting job of frequently meeting new teams with varied research challenges. During all of these meetings, I try to collect my own research about what I hear, and learn from it.
Every team is unique in some ways, but I hear a few challenges over and over again. The struggle of sharing research insights comes up a lot.
What’s so hard about sharing research?
These are the most common challenges I’ve personally heard from product teams across Europe about sharing research internally:
- “There isn’t really an existing time or place for sharing this kind of work with the team.”
- “Packaging insights takes a lot of time. We have to do a lot of extra work to present it all.”
- “We haven’t settled on a solution to a research repository yet.” / “ We don’t know where to store it all for easy team-wide access.”
The first challenge listed above is often accompanied by the concern that adding yet another recurring meeting to the team’s schedule for insights will feel burdensome. Additionally, teams often struggle to find the extra time to package their findings well enough to feel it’s worth sharing with the full company. In the end, key results don’t make their way beyond their immediate project team.
The sharing step shouldn’t make you feel like you’re taking on a new project beside your existing full-time work— and it shouldn’t require new meetings to include it regularly.
Tips for sharing research better, and more often
There are three areas where I’ve seen teams struggle most. In all three, the struggles are at least partly symptoms of overcomplicating the sharing process. There doesn’t always need to be a lot of new time and space created for insights, new formats for sharing, or complex repositories for teams still growing their research practice.
Here are a few quick solutions or first steps for making the sharing process manageable and repeatable -
Sharing in existing forums
- Five minutes at the weekly “Demo”
Less is very often more. And some sharing is certainly better than not sharing. I used to believe that in-depth presentations of all insights from the latest study were the only way to share everything I’d learned. I quickly realized that even the most interesting results — shot rapid-fire one after another for an hour — can be draining. Most of us simply can’t digest so much information at once.
The teams I’ve seen most successfully spread insights knowledge do it in bite-size chunks.
By sharing the 5-minute lightning round of most important insights during a weekly full-team meeting, insights have the opportunity to impact more people.
2. Start a prioritization meeting/standup with Insights
The insights team at one of my clients hosts one meeting every two weeks with each stakeholder team. These meetings are foremost the times for prioritizing projects.
In these meetings, we start with one question: What have you learned since last time?
Anyone with insights to share has the stage. With the existing meeting time and insights-sharing as a prelude to prioritizing projects, the insights trigger action and directly impact key decisions.
Sharing in the right format
3. Write an actual insight (not an observation)
Make sure to present your insight in an actual insight structure that tells your team what happens for the user, and why the scenario occurs.
When we don’t use a proper insights format, we leave out significant information that helps to form a full picture for our audience of the user’s experience or crucial trigger moment.
- Here’s one way to form an insight, from the user perspective: “I (take an action) because it helps me (get this benefit). But I (have this obstacle), so I (do this other thing) instead.”
4. Ask yourself: Am I inspired by this?
If you aren’t inspired by the insights you plan to share, your colleagues probably won’t be, either. An insight should feel like a spark. In some cases, it’s more like a kick in the butt.
Sometimes a simple changing of format is enough to add that extra inspiration and engagement. Nikki Anderson compiled a great list of visual ways to share insights on People Nerds as a helpful place to start.
5. Bring it to life in the user’s actual voice
When it comes to making insights stick, there’s nothing like hearing the user’s voice, or seeing them live, to clarify your insight.
Use video or audio clips in your presentations instead of writing a user’s quote on a slide. As Jim Ross wrote in UX Matters, videos of users often get stakeholders to take the presented problems more seriously.
(Of course, keep in mind whether you received permissions for this, what kind of personally identifiable data the recording contains, and if it feels like you’ve checked the boxes for research ethics).
Storing research for everyone to find
6. Save a simple list of all studies + topics covered in one document
We researchers often overcomplicate things in our quest for perfection and rigor. A recent workshop I attended by Sam Yuen reminded me of that. She aims to synthesize research in a day, and saves all her team’s studies in a list, in a document. Simple!
I used to receive one question from multiple colleagues every week: “Have we researched X?” Having a list of all studies and topics in a document has enabled my colleagues to quickly check for knowledge on a topic themselves, without digging through our team’s various spreadsheets and folders.
Insights summaries and documentation are linked from the list if they need more detail. But quite often, a colleague just needs to determine that what they want to learn about has not been researched yet.
It’s easy for any team member to access and skim a simple list, as well as search the document for keywords or topics they want to learn about. It’s also easier to search a document than slides, and easier to look at than a spreadsheet.
Google Docs and Notion are good options for this.
7. Craft a case study after every project
I’m forever grateful for my time at a big service design agency, where I often had to wrap up projects in a succinct case study to use for the next round of client pitches. While I’ve done this for myself, I rarely see product teams do this.
Case studies are a great practice for summarizing research in a shareable way that anyone in the company can understand. I try to keep each case study to 2–4 slides.
Alternatively, a “one-sheeter” like Danae Paparis recommends, with a quick overview of the process and results on one page, can have a similar value for the team.
Every team has a different level of research and insights maturity. Some teams have a research repository, while other teams’ researchers still save results in their personal folders. Regardless of where a team currently sits on the maturity scale, I’ve often seen companies bring insights into their work faster by taking a simpler approach to sharing.
If sharing is a challenge, make it a series of simple steps rather than building sharing into a full project of its own. The tasks that take too much from an already overloaded team will never get done. Big things are accomplished in small steps.
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