How to ensure you don’t lose your audience 5 minutes into your user research presentation
The one essential tip to telling better stories around design: first, establish common ground
One of my most awkward experiences as a Junior Designer was presenting user research to a silent crowd.
After presenting our user testing results, I saw a sea of blank faces and what felt like an eternity of silence. It was broken by the Product Manager giving me noncommital thanks, and it was at that moment I knew that they probably wouldn’t follow my design recommendations.
While you might not have experienced something awkward, presenting user insights to a mixed audience can be daunting and sometimes ineffective, as your stakeholders don’t seem to listen to your suggestions.
I’ve discussed the impact design storytelling can have on engaging users and helping you avoid these situations. However, I made a more straightforward mistake that lost my audience: I failed to establish common ground.
To explain why common ground is essential, let’s take the perspective of a target audience member.
Why common ground is essential for understanding
Imagine you’re the VP of Product and barely made it to this presentation.
Your calendar is usually packed with meetings around four different projects, and you just came into this meeting after discussing another project in detail.
You know this is about customer feedback around your product, but suddenly, the Designer comes up and says, “We need to add onboarding to this product, because our users don’t understand what to do.”
Suddenly, you’re pushed into a fight-or-flight response, thinking about the project timeline and the launch date. You notice the Product Manager getting antsy as well.
“This guy’s not even wearing a suit.” You think to yourself. “Does he know what he’s talking about?”
Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating with the last step, but the point is that you’ve lost your audience’s attention right away.
You might have had a well-structured presentation with a suitable introduction, detailed research methods, and a narrative arc that addresses your audience’s tensions and provides solutions.
But none of that matters if you don’t establish common ground for your audience to work with. Nothing illustrates this better than the Youtube series “5 levels”.
In this series, a subject matter expert, like a Computer Scientist, explains one concept to different levels of audiences, ranging from children to Experts.
The best experts in this series immediately establish common ground suitable to the person they’re talking to. From talking about how machines identify cats and dogs with a child to diving into technical details with experts, the speakers work to build a rapport and shared understanding with their audience.
You should take a similar approach to them because whether you realize it or not, you’ve also become an expert.
You’re the subject matter expert on users, and when you’re presenting user research findings, you’re compiling several weeks or months’ worth of work into a one-hour meeting.
So it’s a shame if you did all that work and lost them in the first five minutes because they’re not exactly sure what you’re talking about.
How exactly do you go about establishing common ground? By thinking about our first step.
Establish a shared first step to build trust
Have you ever noticed that many of your favorite stories don’t start in the middle of the action?
They take the time to ease you into the setting, creating a shared understanding of the world before moving forward. This is important so that you understand where you’re coming from and what expectations you might have. For example:
Are we on Earth or a galaxy far, far away?
Who is the main character, and what is their personality?
What type of environment is the story taking place in?
Etc.
Addressing these things helps set expectations of what’s to come and a sense of trust. These things are essential because violating that trust can have incredibly negative consequences.
For example, if I promise you a realistic story and dragons appear halfway through, many audiences will turn away because that trust has been violated.
Establishing common ground within your presentations is about highlighting similar questions:
Are we talking about the current state of the product or a future state?
Who is our user/customer, and what are we asking them to do?
How did we collect data, and is this representative of our user groups?
How do the issues we’re encountering today affect things we care about in the future?
Where are we on our intended timeline of actions?
Tom Greever, the author of Articulating Design Decisions, suggests several ways you can do this with your presentations:
This includes:
Stating the overall agreed-upon goal
Summarizing the last meeting and the last steps taken
Showing a timeline of where you are in the process
Specifying what feedback you’re looking for
Continually restating the goal to ensure that we’re reinforcing our agreed-upon common ground
However, the first thing you need to do is spend a little time defining who your audience is.
Define the level of familiarity your audience has with the project
In addition to understanding who you’re targeting, one of the first things is to understand how familiar your audience maybe with a project. You might consider where they lie on a scale from ‘internal’ to ‘external’ team members.
Internal team members are those close to a project whom you may interact with daily. For example, the Product Manager you meet with every week would be considered an ‘internal’ team member.
External team members are typically considered outside the organization, such as customers, but that might only sometimes be the case. These may be people that you don’t interact with regularly, such as C-suite executives or people on different teams. For example, the VP of Product would be an external team member.
This scale is essential for one key reason: it determines the level of credibility you’re likely to have with your audience. It’s not as though you’re untrustworthy if you’re presenting to external team members, but you typically have to work harder to establish why they should trust you compared with people you see every day.
You can start to align your presentation to match your audience.
Align slides (and understanding) with your common ground
Once you consider the expected familiarity with your audience, you can consider whether your current presentation is catered to their needs.
While it’s not always the case, here are a few guidelines for each team.
Internal audiences (Project teams, people close to the project, etc.):
May want a deeper dive into the subject
May not care about research methods
May immediately understand business jargon/UX acronyms
May not need to spend a lot of time setting up common ground
May want additional details about your data
External audiences (Customers, C-level executives, etc.):
May want a higher-level overview of a project
Will need a fair amount of common ground established (What is this project, what’s been done, etc.)
May need definitions for business jargon/UX acronyms
May want an overview of research methods (i.e., Why should I trust you?)
May only want simplified findings
As with most presentations, you need to (link) choose one person you will target as the primary audience, and from there, think about where they might fall on this scale.
For example, if you’re presenting to a primarily external audience, but your slides are very detailed, this might not fit them best. Instead, you may find that you’ll need to spend a little bit more time talking about the context first.
However, remember that you’ll often have a mixed audience who may want different levels of detail. One important thing you can do is explicitly address these things, like “I’m going to stay high level today. Jeff, I know you’re going to want more details, so I’d be happy to walk you through it in more detail afterwards.”
However, there’s one last step you should do to ensure you’re establishing that common ground.
Repeat and rephrase stakeholder questions to establish credibility
If someone asks you questions after your presentation that seem to be directly addressed on your slides, that doesn’t always mean they weren’t paying attention.
Sometimes, they’re trying to put your results in an explanation they can understand, so it’s crucial to help them. Repeating and rephrasing is an essential design skill that helps balance meeting them where they are and teaching them about design.
For example, imagine they say, “If users don’t understand the task, let’s just add a button here to direct them to our help center.” It’s an immediate (and awkward) solution to a problem you addressed, and it probably isn’t the right choice.
In these cases, we need to rephrase it to show that we’re not only listening to them but also establishing new common ground around a problem (users don’t understand the task).
In this case, we might say, “What I hear you saying is that we can provide context-sensitive help when users are stuck. What instructions would we need to provide to help, in this case?”
Doing so ensures that we’re having productive conversations around issues that matter while establishing a shared understanding that provides your stakeholders insight into what matters.
Establishing common ground means starting at the same place
At its core, establishing common ground is about establishing credibility and trust. That’s why it’s so important to establish at the beginning of a presentation.
Without trust (or belief that you know what you’re talking about), your organization may ignore your deeper insights, which can be catastrophic. It’s critical to remember that you are the expert on user needs, and you need to persuade others to pay attention to what they need.
Ensuring that you create common ground for the rest of your team to begin understanding allows for more effective (and persuasive) presentations.
So if you’ve ever found yourself facing a sea of blank faces after your presentation, consider whether you worked to establish common ground at the start (or if they might have gotten lost).
Doing so ensures you can advocate for users and have your audience listen.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer, Data-Informed Design Author, and Top Design Writer on Medium. His new free book, The Resilient UX Professional, provides real-world advice to get your first UX job and advance your UX career.