10 Rules for Effective Research Narratives
Reporting isn’t the finishing touch on impactful research. It’s part of the foundation. Here’s how to tell clear, assertive stories that can motivate product teams to make real changes for the benefit of users.
After all the effort you’ve spent planning your research, executing it, and analyzing the data, you finally make it to the report writing stage. It’s tempting to blow through this final step. But your insights are really only as effective as how you convey them. Ultimately, your narrative can make or break the impact of your research. If your insights don’t form a cohesive story, they’re just a lump of observations. Here are my 10 most important tips for writing clear and effective research narratives.
Stage I: Preparing your narrative
1. Think about your deliverable when developing your research brief
The goal here is not to assume what the findings will be. The goal is to ensure that the research design will result in an actionable narrative. While constructing your research brief, focus on how the results will be framed up. Things to think about:
- Develop a clear set of hypotheses. You may not know exactly what the results will be, but you should have a set of hypotheses that you want answers to. Those hypotheses can lay the groundwork for what your report structure will be, as well as your main points in the TL;DR.
- Know the type of findings you’ll get back. For example, you may not know exactly what motivates people to visit Facebook, but you know that your study will uncover motivations. So structuring your report around motivation types is a potential way to organize your insights.
- Imagine the type of visuals. Similarly, you can’t say exactly what the visual components will look like, but based on your hypotheses and the kind of results you expect, you can imagine the ideal visuals to convey your points. For example, if you’re aiming to understand steps in someone’s decision making, you may want some kind of visual journey map.
2. Outline first
By the time you start writing your report, the team likely wanted insights last week. Our impulse is often to jump straight into the deck or the note and figure it out as we go along. But if you do this, your narrative is more likely to get muddied. This process might be fine if you’re delivering tactical insights — a quick note, for example, on the top 5 usability issues. But if you’re trying to weave together a compelling story or argument, you need to outline it first. A bare-bones outline lets you move points around easily and see how your argument stacks up before you start fiddling around with visuals. I personally make outlines in a document, but outlining in slides can also be effective if you’re a more visual person. Just be careful not to get caught up in the visual design yet.
3. Focus on your thesis
As researchers, we often feel compelled to include all the interesting insights. After all, we did all this work, so we want to be as comprehensive as possible. But your audience is going to remember maybe 3 things from your report. So when constructing your narrative, think about what you want to organize the report around. This requires more than just a succinct tl;dr (which is also important). This is about knowing your main thesis before you start writing, and then structuring the insights around that thesis. The hardest part is being OK with not reporting every single thing you find.
Stage II: Writing clearly
These next few rules represent some of the most common writing mistakes I see. They’re easy to correct once you know what to look for.
4. Write in active voice, not passive voice
- Passive: Several errors were made when trying to expand the player to full screen.
- Active: Participants made several errors when trying to expand the player to full screen.
Active voices have subjects. Passive voices do not. Who is taking the action? If you can’t easily identify who’s acting out the verb in your sentence, then you’re writing in passive voice. Active voice is stronger and clearer. It also tends to be more concise since passive voice requires more words. Is this a hard and fast rule? No. As with most stylistic choices, this is not something I adhere to 100% of the time. You might be making a point where you want to emphasize the object of the sentence and not the subject. But that should be a conscious decision, rather than a default style.
5. Less is more
We can all agree that it’s better to be clear and concise, but we often overcomplicate our language without realizing it. Here are some specific things to watch out for:
- Use straightforward sentence structure
- Avoid using “formal” writing
- Break up long sentences
Really what these mistakes come down to is using too many words to convey a very simple idea. After I write a draft, I comb through it with the intention of simplifying phrases. And lastly, consider how an image can convey your point more effectively than a wall of text. Sometimes a simple table, graph, or flow chart is more memorable and easier to understand.
6. Use straightforward sentences
We can avoid many unclear and clunky sentences by relying on a simple subject-verb-object sentence construction.
- Indirect: Talking to 10 participants, we found that people preferred Option A over Option B
- The problem: This sentence feels clunky. The only reason to lead with a modifier clause like ‘talking to 10 participants’ is if you want to emphasize the fact that you talked to participants or you had 10 of them.
- Solution: We talked to 10 participants and found that they preferred Option A over Option B
While using subject-verb-object for every sentence might sound robotic, this simple, direct construction is often the best way to convey your point.
7. Avoid conditional statements
When you use a conditional verb like could, would, or might, you’re using an unsure voice. Unless you’re intentionally trying to convey uncertainty (as with qualitative findings that are directional), drop the conditional verb.
- Conditional: Users would need multiple options in order to feel in control of the experience
- Solution: Users need multiple options in order to feel in control of the experience.
In this scenario, you’re not trying to convey a speculative or provisional idea. You’re conveying an observation and recommendation. Using would weakens your point.
Stage III: Giving your narrative impact
8. TL;DRs are your best friend
My colleague Carolyn Wei has an excellent note on writing memorable TL;DRs. The TL;DR of her TL;DR note is:
- 1-sentence headline
- 3–4 supporting arguments or findings
- 1-sentence call to action, recommendation, or provocation
9. Insights should stand out visually and show implication/synthesis
An insight should be more than just a factual observation. If the audience doesn’t know why they should care about something, they won’t. Be explicit about how the insight impacts the product and what you think the team should do as a result.
- The observation: 60% of new users came to the app because they heard that the NBA playoffs were streaming for free
- Insight with implication: High-profile events that are best viewed on a big screen present opportunities for us to attract new TV app users.
Visually, the insight should stand out on the slide or in the note. I like to put the insight into the main header so that people can easily get the primary takeaways when they’re quickly scanning the report. The supporting details and factual observations that back up your insight then go into the bullets.
10. Be specific in your recommendations
Don’t shy away from making direct recommendations. I very much understand the tendency to not be too prescriptive. I used to write very vague recommendations. Even when I aimed to be precise, I couched my language in conditional verbs so as not to seem too dictatorial. But I’ve since learned to embrace giving specific recommendations. I use imperative sentences, which lend recommendations more authority, and I focus on the specifics of the product implications. Our job as researchers is to combine our strategic expertise of the product with research insights to deliver next steps that help the team move forward.
- Vague: Give people more opportunities for discovering new videos.
- Specific: Give people different ways to browse for videos, beyond just autoplaying videos in feed view. Explore new discovery features like category pills and hashtags.
