How to share your research findings effectively

After a long day of testing at Happy Labs, you’ve probably gathered a huge amount of information to improve your product or service. Now the most time consuming (and for some, boring) part begins: writing a report of all the results you’ve gathered during the research. In this Happy Story we tell you about the best ways to bundle and present this information.

So, at the end of this article you know:

Why you should report your user insights

Tips and tricks for effective sharing of user insights

Why share the user insights?  

But why and for who are you doing all this work? For your team, your boss, important stakeholders?
Do they have the time and energy to read your whole report? Do they wanna know everything you’ve learned or just a few parts of it? Probably they don’t even read the whole report. But you’re asked to write it, so you will do it anyway.

Of course, you always need to analyse your findings in order to make sense of all the input you’ve got. The insights you gather during user research are rarely only relevant for the people who were present at the testing day. Often other people in- and outside the organization could also benefit from the insights. But you do got a choice in the way you present your findings: it doesn’t have to be a long report with a lot of text. Explore all your possibilities, use the power of the internet!

That’s why we use a platform!

At Happy Labs we use a user insights platform called Sticktail, that enables us to share interactive user insights with our clients. With interactive we mean: insights with videos, GIFs and links. A video says more than a thousand words! So no more boring and long reports!

Tips for sharing user insights

Here are some tips on how to share your user insights more effectively (regardless of which tool you use):

  • One key message at a time: don’t sum up all your findings and think you’re done. Cluster your findings to discover user insights – the why behind the behaviour of your user. Learn more about writing valuable insights
  • Think about your audience: how would they like to receive your insights? What’s important for them and what not? What do they want to achieve with your insights? Communicate your insights with their perspective.
  • Be clear, don’t act smart: you can use a lot of fancy and meaningless words trying to come across as an expert. But that’s not your goal, you want people to learn something from your research. Keep it short and simple.
  • Write less, show more: most people don’t like to read. Besides people forget text more easily than images or videos. If you’re able to make your point clear with an image or a video fragment, do it! A video of your users will be even more convincing than numbers.
  • Save your user insights at one central place: hopefully you didn’t do research for only one project team for one particular moment. If others can benefit from your research they need to have quick access to your insights and know where to find them (we use Sticktail for this as well). It also saves you time: you don’t have to be a librarian any longer – searching for insights in old reports all day.

Happy Testing!

Just try some of the tips and test and learn what works well in your organization. Why wouldn’t you test the way you communicate your research findings most effectively if it’s your job to do (user) research ;). And we are always there to help you with user research or sharing your insights in an effective way!

Happy Week!