Analyzing & presenting insights is just half of your job as a UX researcher
Back to the beginning of the pandemic, our research team decided to carry out the first Jobs to be Done study in a fintech company in London. It was an amazing opportunity for us to uncover user needs and actually make an impact on the users. After a month and a half of hard work doing mapping interviews, writing, deduping outcome statements, designing the survey & debating the variables for the secondary analysis, we were thrilled to present to the whole product team (and beyond) the first JTBD study in the company.
However, the more we presented our findings, the less engagement we got from stakeholders. What had happened in the process? We were haunted for days trying to understand what was wrong with the study that we proudly worked on until one day, at the end of the presentation a product manager asked us:
“Can you guys repeat again what are those dots and what do they represent in all of the graphs please?” 🫠
There it was, our EUREKA moment: We realized that we built the entire presentation for ourselves rather than for the audience that was actually going to implement our findings. It was clear to us (and to the data scientists who were even more proficient in statistical analysis than us) that we were sitting in a gold mine, due to the fact that the majority of the needs were still underserved within our key markets as well as competitors. So what did we do about it? We iterated the way in which we presented our findings. Here are the key elements we learned through that process and that today we called A.R.M.E.D:
A: Attention
R: Relevant to your audience
M: What is your key message?
E: Give Examples
D: What do you want them to do with this information?
Attention
Remote working is the new normal and therefore is crucial to keep a high level of attention and engagement during the video calls. Ways in which we were able to do this, were by asking questions, and using tools like Kahoot or Mentimeter can help you with the level of engagement during these meetings. In addition to that, promote conversations around a wider team by splitting the meetings as well as giving coffee breaks if the meeting is too long.
Relevant to your audience
Stakeholders are internal users, so you also need to think about their needs. Finding ways to iterate the way in which you present your findings can benefit your relationship with them. To give you some inspiration, we even did a podcast format of this study for our stakeholders in customer service support, as realized that they were always on calls and had a limited amount of time for meetings. After we did a non-fancy & scrappy podcast, we actually received great ideas from that team that was eventually iterated in our product roadmap.
When presenting to senior stakeholders and decision-makers, always try to give an executive summary, or what we called “dessert first”, which is displaying your research findings at the top and then all of the detailed findings at the end if someone wants to deep-dive into a particular finding.
What is your key message?
Before you start building your presentation, always ask yourself this question. You will find that sometimes, the key message might be different per team, but that’s ok. As long as you are able to work together with these teams and make an impact together.
Give examples
Not also different industries have their own jargon, but also every single team within the same company has its own jargon. Be mindful of that and provide examples that are relevant to the audience, you will see that your key message below, which we just talked about above, will be more appreciated.
As researchers we love talking with fancy words in every sentence. Forget about it and always remember a great tip that one of my previous managers gave me called the KISS principle: Keep.it.simple.stupid.
Finally, what do you want stakeholders to do in your research findings?
Analyzing & presenting insights was just half of your job was the title of this article. If you are not able to measure the impact or at least of your findings, that means that you had wasted your time. Don’t get me wrong on this point, UX research allows teams to have a higher or lower level of confidence in certain decisions in a tactical or strategic manner, and there will be times when your research didn’t have the impact that you expected. That doesn’t mean that you are not able to see in retrospect what you can change in terms of processes, insights, or even presenting your findings.
Once you had decided what your key message was, think about what you want stakeholders to do with that information. Some of the things we start doing after presenting findings were to create in collaboration with the design team HMW workshops, where we tried to solve the need rather than solutionizing, in addition to that we changed the ways in which we interacted with product managers, marketing and the pricing team, that allowed us to follow up on initiatives that were seeded by that discovery phase of our study,
What did we get from all of that?
If it wasn’t because we recognized that we failed to deliver the message from the JTBD presentation, today we wouldn’t be able to say that thanks to the iterative process, we weren’t able to build a whole web relaunch based on those opportunities scores of that study, most importantly, that the product team started building their roadmap based on user needs rather than features. That is just to say, that humbleness is definitely the skill to grow in order to appropriately deliver the other 50% of your job as a UX researcher and make a huge impact on your company.
