Delivering research insights

What happens when you finish analyzing research insights? How do you convey what you’ve learned? I personally believe that the sooner you can get insights into the hands of teams, the better. This process starts before you even finish analyzing the data.

Ownership in the process

One of the first steps in delivering research insights to teams is involving them in the research itself. If the research you’re doing will impact them, then you should involve them in planning, scoping, and observing the research from day one. This not only builds ownership, but gives them the opportunity to observe the insights firsthand. There is nothing more powerful than participating in the process yourself.

Don’t wait until you have a report put together to let them in on findings.

Reporting insights

How you report research insights depends on a lot of factors. Consider goals, timeline, and the people you’re interacting with. Ideally, you should choose the method that provides the most value given the constraints you’re working with.

A concise report today will always beat a pristine slide deck tomorrow. This is especially true if it means the team receiving the research insights can consider them in design sooner.

If you’re still proving the value of research, you might need to do both a short and long format report — one for the team that needs it and one to wow leadership. And even if your organization values research now, there may be times when a more formalized presentation works best.

Why format matters

I remember when I was auditing a research lab in a previous job and I found some old research reports in an old desk drawer. They were five years old. Each of them had walls of text in a reading level that was far from plain language. I brought them to the attention of others, but I quickly learned no one ever used them as they were difficult to get through. We chose to create our own research report templates from scratch after learning that.

Research findings are not meant to collect dust in a drawer. What you learn when you conduct research should be easy to understand and actionable.

The never-ending report

When I started working at BlueCross BlueShield of TN, I quickly learned that the format of choice for delivering work was slide decks. This was initially helpful to get buy-in from leadership to understand how research could help the product pipeline. However, once we had a research team that was conducting studies regularly, this format became an obstacle for delivering insights.

Our efforts to create informational and beautiful presentations often resulted in us keeping insights captive for weeks. Sometimes this meant we delivered insights after a release, which would push out any design changes based on research for months. At times it also rendered our findings partially useless as the design had already changed.

Additionally, just like the reports I had found collecting dust in an old desk drawer, our slide decks found themselves in a similar situation because of their length (sometimes 50 slides worth). After the initial presentation(s), no one referred to the slide deck. We essentially spent time building something that no one would ever use again.

I advocated for shorter, more concise reports to deliver value sooner, but there was resistance. Change is hard. I eventually found an opportunity to show the value of short research reports. We got to a point when we could no longer afford to create extensive slide decks for every study. The attempt was successful and we adopted it as one of our more common delivery methods.

Research delivery formats

The basic report

When putting together a short report, remember you just need to get to the point. If it takes you more than a few hours, you’re probably going more in-depth than needed.

Consider creating a report that includes the following:

• Goal — Describe the learning goal of the study. You can include your research questions here.
• Approach — Describe the method you use to conduct your research, what was actually tested, the number of participants in the study, and the timeline.
• Insights summary — List the main insight categories/findings. Include any insights that may be critical to success even if they were only mentioned or observed one or a very few number of times.
• Recommendation(s) — Depending on the role of your research team, you might need to provide recommendations based on findings. Please note that these are not — and should not — prescribe solutions.
• Quantitative summary — List any UX benchmarks, ratings, and measurements that provide critical insights. If not critical or if the study didn’t include the collection of any quantitative data, then you can ignore this section.
• Quotes — Include participant quotes, if any, that represent the findings or add context to the insights.
• Appendix — List all insights and include any UX benchmarks, ratings, and measurements that you may have captured during the study. This should be an easy copy-paste of the data you produced as you analyzed your findings.

Presentations

While slide deck presentations are pretty commonly used, it’s surprising how often you see slide decks that drag on before they get to the point. You can create slide decks that are informational and also usable.

Consider the following tips to make them more actionable:

• Bottom line up front — Make sure you get to the point right away so that if someone leaves early you don’t risk them not hearing about your main discoveries. Structure your presentation so you start with a summary and then dive deeper into each topic.
• Communicate findings clearly — If you conducted a small, qualitative study, don’t inflate your participant numbers by showing percentages instead of numbers. If you’d like to show percentages, make sure to also call out how many people the percentages represent.
• Chunk findings — Make your presentation easier to read and get through by providing findings in small, bite-sized pieces.
• Show proof — If possible, include video clips, audio clips, and/or quotes throughout your presentation. Chances are there is someone in the room that did not participate in the research process. Do make sure you anonymize the videos, audio, and quotes you do show to protect your participants.

Other artifacts

A report might not be the best way to convey the findings or the only thing you might need to put together to convey them. Consider your goals and the reason you set out to do research in the first place.

There are many types of research-based artifacts you can put together to deliver value. You can collaborate with team members from other teams and disciplines to create these. Some examples of research deliverables include:

• Personas
• Journey maps
• Flows (e.g., process flows, flowcharts, etc.)
• Storyboards
• Diagrams (e.g., mental models)
• Problem statement

Research repository

Reports, presentations, and other artifacts are not the only way to collect and distribute research insights. Research repositories store research artifacts and findings for future reference and reuse. More and more teams are looking into what it means to track and make their insights accessible. Some more modern repositories are even searchable.

If you’re considering improving the way you share findings, I recommend evaluating the current state of your research assets. How are you handling your research assets before and after sharing your deliverables? Whether you’re intentional about how you store them or not, if you conduct research, you have a research repository. If you’re unsure of how to start putting together a more actionable repository, the ResearchOps community is a great place to start.

Agile research

In an ever-changing world where Agile methodologies are replacing waterfall processes, the ability to communicate research findings quickly and efficiently is becoming extremely valuable.

You may find that conducting research in smaller chunks will help research efforts keep up pace with an Agile team. Some have taken to training team members from other disciplines (e.g., data engineering, business analysts, etc.) to do their own research to speed up research. Democratizing research in this way helps make research insights more accessible. However, this requires a lot of guidance and can potentially negatively affect how your organization perceives research.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you need to do what works best for your team. Having said that, I do believe that the best research is the research that actually gets surfaced and used. If you’re not at a place where you can yet create small, actionable reports instead of large presentations in your organization, it might take trying a combination of both at first. This will help you understand and convey the value it can provide your organization.

Thank you Kim Alban and Graham for reviewing this article.