How to drive meaningful change with your user research presentations
Ensure your team acts on the most critical user findings through the Funnel
User research presentations shouldn’t be objective, and that mistake may be causing them to fall flat.
If you believe otherwise, don’t worry: you’re not alone. It took me over half my design career to learn this painful lesson. Initially, I believed user research was about defining everything you saw users doing and saying.
However, I’ve seen the aftermath of that objective view: 100-page usability reports used as doorsteps and “user research” as a checkbox without making a difference. I’m not saying our UX research methods or process is wrong.
Instead, I’m saying that what we gather from user research and what we share with our team are two completely different things.
To explain why, let’s talk about bad Data Visualizations.
User research is for you, but insights are for your audience
Have you ever encountered terrible Data Visualizations in presentations?
Whether they’re confusing, generated entirely by Excel, or unreadable, these Visualizations are usually bad for one key reason: they weren’t built with the audience in mind.
The presenter, an expert in the data, often tries to showcase something they learned, as if they’re talking to other data experts. The problem is that their audience isn’t data experts; this may be their first time seeing this data.
As a result, the audience isn’t sure what message they should take away from it. That’s what we often do with user research.
Over weeks or months, we've become experts in understanding users by talking with users, conducting user testing, and analyzing feedback.
We aren’t trying to turn our team into similar experts by telling them everything we’ve learned: They don’t need to or want to. Instead, they want your expert advice on what decisions must be made, your recommendations, and enough context to decide.
In other words, user research is about making yourself (and the UX team) experts in user needs. You use this knowledge to identify specific insights and actions your audience should know about.
Whether you’re approving design changes, determining the next steps around a particular user problem, or approving another round of user testing, this is the most important thing you must convey to them.
This is where the data pyramid, or the DIKW pyramid, is helpful to understand.