Know your story: Narrative Insights for User research

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Research in UX

Within Experience Design, we are a multi-discipline community working together to provide the best experience for our users. Within that community, User research can help us understand our users better and provide direction for products. This can range from validation/evaluative research to help test designs/ideas to discovery/generative research to help us learn more about our users and their needs.

In an ideal world, this all fits together into a seamless UCD (User-Centred Design) flow in which we translate user needs and pain points into design ideas and solutions!

Need for insights

In reality, design and research are both multifaceted disciplines in their own rights meaning there are several handovers between research and various stakeholders. However, research for research’s sake is pointless, which is where working effectively across disciplines is important to make sure we create impactful research and that stakeholders get the most out of research outputs.

There are a lot of aspects of research no one outside of research cares about, and nor should they have to. That is why we often use insight reports to help us present key research findings back to stakeholders. But how do we ensure our insights give the right insight?

Building Narrative into insights to drive engagement with stakeholders

How to engage

There are a few different needs to consider when crafting insights as we are often serving them to a wide audience. We could need to consider:

• Different levels of stakeholders are looking to research to understand different things about our users.
• Different takeaways for different disciplines.
• Different levels of giving a hoot, especially when you are trying to increase the research maturity in your community. You may be trying to encourage buy-in from people who aren’t as sold on the pros of your work.

With all that in mind, how do you create insights that can be shared, with multiple stakeholders, in multiple different areas of the business? While also making sure our insights are reusable and have longevity past the initial project to build a broader understanding of our users?

Narrative writing

The main thing we need to do to achieve all this is to have insights easily digestible and enjoyable to read. To do that we could look at other mediums people like to read: stories! There are various ways to think about stories and the narrative structures they use, and I am no expert. However, if we look at one of the more popular narrative structures, Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” we can see how these structures might help lift our insights and better define the takeaways we want our stakeholders to engage with.

Hero’s Journey

We will look at a simplified version of this popularised by TV writer Dan Harmon he calls the story circle we can think about the story as having 8 steps:

1. The status quo: where our hero begins in a zone of comfort.
2. Need: They need something.
3. Go: They journey out into the unknown
4. Search: For what they need, adapting to the new situation.
5. Find: What they were looking for.
6. Take: But it’s not quite what they expected, they pay a heavy price.
7. Return: They return to their familiar situation.
8. Change: But they have changed from their experience having learnt something new.

A simplified Story circle

This structure can be found across lots of stories from Odysseus and The Hobbit to Luke Skywalker and Batman. Here is a great overview of its use and mapping it to the dark knight:

But how can we use it to show our research’s journey?

Narrative insights

By making our research the hero in this journey we can see how we may map our existing processes to this kind of story:

1. The status quo: what do we currently know about our users?
2. Need: what do we need to find out?
3. Go: we must journey into research to answer this question.
4. Search: we conduct some research to answer it.
5. Find: we get some results.
6. Take: But it’s not quite what we expected, we found out other stuff!
7. Return: We compare what we found out to what we thought we knew.
8. Change: But our understanding has changed having learnt something new.

The research story circle, making your research the hero of the story

To help start conceptualising your research as a more narrative insight, you can follow allow with this Miro template exercise: Narrative Insights by Joe Newbold

The status quo and need sections of the Miro template

Start with the status quo. Where are you now? List out the existing research you have that is relevant and identify what your current understanding of the problem space. Next identify the need for your research. List out the questions or barriers you have identified and ask stakeholders to share theirs, you can use those to identify the main need for the research.

Go and Search sections of the Miro template

This is where your research comes in! Develop the research question that addresses your core need, this should be answerable by your research (try not to get too broad and avoid “Why?” questions). Now we have set the scene, we can start thinking about our search and the actual methodology and what was done.

Find and Take sections of the Miro template

For our results we want to structure them based on the core findings from our work with evidence to point stakeholders too. Then we take and start to bring things full circle and link our findings back to our research question.

Return and Change sections of the Miro template

Finally, we have our reflections and takeaways. What are the new perspectives or confirmations that your findings bring as we return to the status quo? You can then end with how things have changed: whether you have addressed your need and what the next steps after the research are.

Here is an example from some our recent Accountant research:

Our example accountants user research story

1. The status quo: We know that accountants are busy and need to use a lot of different tools/platforms to complete their work.
2. Need: We need to know how accountants manage these context switches, so we can better facilitate them.
3. Go: Our question “How do accountants manage switch platforms across their day-to-day work”.
4. Search: We conducted a week-long diary study with 5 accountants on what tasks they complete and how they switch between them.
5. Find: We find that there are three main kinds of tasks accountants are switching platforms to complete: management tasks, informational tasks or actual accounting tasks (i.e. using a specific accounting product).
6. Take: But rather than switching between these platforms completely, they are often working across different platforms to complete bigger pieces of work.
7. Return: Accountants are switching between platforms not only to complete different pieces of accounting work but also to find different information and manage their own workflow.
8. Change: Accountants don’t need support task switching as much as they need easy access to information and task management.

By building this narrative, we were able to clearly communicate the findings of this research into a new user need around these different kind of tasks.

You can also use the Miro template to start building out our report structure for narrative insights to bring your story to life with highlights from your sessions! Narrative Insights by Joe Newbold

The research report example Exec summary of the Miro template

Benefits

One of the main benefits of structuring your research insights in this way is that you don’t miss important takeaways. The narrative flow will force you to consider your work in terms of “Setup and resolution”, meaning you focus on the goals of the research and concrete takeaways stakeholders. There is also still room for that important methodological detail and reflective discussion, but for those engaging in our research more passively they can get the “story arc” even if they miss the details (you can know Batman saves the day without knowing his butler’s name).

However, one of the real bonuses I have found in adopting this perspective on user research is in building empathy for users across different projects and bringing stakeholders into that story. At the start of a piece of research, rather than getting bogged down in discussion guides, recruitment, and analysis techniques, we are thinking about the evolving story our research is telling us. What did the last instalment uncover? What are we exploring in the next chapter? And how will the narrative of our users’ experience grow? Think about research in this way doesn’t inherently change the day-to-day of research (you will still have to worry about discussion guides, recruitment, and analysis techniques) but it helps fight against research for research’s sake and build narratives that stick with people, can be reused, and ultimately help UX teams build better experiences.

Putting it into practice

So, all that is left to do is put it into practice in your research! You could use the steps above to outline your next project or look at your most recent research output, to see what steps you’re missing and how it might improve your research narrative. Most importantly also make sure your research has a purpose (the setup up) and key takeaways (the resolution).

And you use it anywhere, even Medium articles ;)

The story circle about this article about story circle!