Communicating user research
The way you present your research is as important as its insights
So you’ve done some research. You have lots of ideas for how to integrate that research into your product to make it better. But first, you have to communicate what you’ve discovered to your team and to stakeholders.
How you communicate your research is critical to seeing your insights become actions. These are some tips for taking your research from your users to your product roadmap.
Capture report-ready insights on the go
When you’re doing user research, you should always be taking notes—you can keep your note-taking lean, but you should always be capturing data.
If you have a template in mind for communicating your research, you can reverse-engineer your note-taking template to match, making reporting quick and easy.
Two things you want to capture are quotes and themes. Quotes bring your research to life—it’s more powerful to show a user explicitly saying what they want than to say, “users wanted X.” In Steadfast Messenger, you can take screenshots of quotes to include in your reports.
Themes validate your insights—they show that a comment didn’t come from just one person and that you did your due diligence to present representative data. (Of course, edge insights that come from a small group of users can be useful as well.)
Themes and quotes work best together! Show a theme and then use quotes to explain how it’s impacting customer experience
Translate insights to actions
You have quotes and themes—before you take them to the team, you need to take one more step to translate them to actions. What can we do or change to mitigate a usability issue? How can we add value to leverage an opportunity?
Translate your insights to actions, and prioritize actions to serve your business model.
Prioritize your recommendations by making a business case. If a certain feature is hindering users’ ability to complete a purchase, for example, that should take priority over a possible value add that’s not core to the user experience.
Match your report to its audience
UX your communication!
If your stakeholders are traditional enterprise managers, you may want to provide a detailed report showing all your work. If it’s a busy founder, distil it down to a brief Slack message or phone call. If it’s your team, you may want to distribute a slide deck that shows some mock-ups of how you want to change a feature based on your research to kick off a conversation about feasibility.
Consider your audience and your goals for how they engage with your research, and then, once again, work backwards. Structure your communication to meet your goals.
With Steadfast Messenger, you can easily capture lean research insights. Reach out!
