Communicating research findings and insights

Good communication is a key skill for a researcher. You need to be able to communicate with users, your team, and your stakeholders, especially when presenting your findings.

As researchers, we are constantly communicating. It helps us to build rapport and understanding and ultimately deliver insights that have impact. User research is only as good as its impact. A good rule to follow is ‘one third research, two thirds communication.’

Whenever you do user research, you should share your findings with your team so they can use what you’ve learned to:

• make design decisions
• prioritise their work
• write new user stories
• refine existing user needs
• develop your proposition or roadmap

Depending on how you carried out your research and what you learned, you might also want to share it with:

• stakeholders
• other researchers
• other service teams
• users of your service
• members of the public

The more you share, the more people will learn about your users and your service. They’ll also ask questions, spot gaps and comment on what you’re doing – all of which will help you design a better service.

Ways of communicating

There are a number of ways you can communicate findings and insights:

• presenting findings at show and tells
• updating your research wall (this could be a wall in your team space where you put up journey maps, personas, insights, screenshots, analytics, which may also exist online)
• presenting video clips of your research
• creating posters or infographics with quotes from participants
• writing a departmental blog

The format should be tailored according to audience and purpose. You will communicate differently to team members and to members of the public, for example.

In agile sprints, it is common to hold playback user research sessions. These sessions inform the multi-disciplinary team of your research findings and influence design decisions that would benefit users. As it is quite high level, this sort of presentation would probably not be easily understood by someone not directly involved with the team.

A show and tell is an opportunity for the team to share their work and findings with a wider audience. This allows other areas of the organisation to know more and to find opportunities for overlap, which means that work can be reused or added to if appropriate.

In these sessions, questions and answers from people not directly involved can bring a fresh perspective to your research and can highlight new information and connections to explore.