Sharing your findings

User research is only useful if your team can use what you've learned to improve your service.

Who to share your research with and why

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 product 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.

How to share research findings

It's important to update your team regularly, ideally at a fixed time each week or sprint. You should also look for opportunities to share findings with people outside your team.

You can share what you've learned by:

• presenting findings at show and tells
• updating your research wall (for example, a wall in your team space where you put up journey maps, personas, insights, screenshots, analytics)
• presenting video clips of your research
• creating posters with quotes from participants
• blogging on a departmental blog

You should share your findings as soon as possible. The sooner the team understands what you've learned, the sooner they can use the findings to make informed decisions about how to design and build the service.

Find out how to build a research wall.

Presenting your findings

A simple way to present research findings is to create a group of slides (or 'slide deck') that includes:

• one or two slides that outline the research you did
• five to ten slides that describe your findings
• one or two slides that show what you're doing next (if relevant).

Slide decks in this format are easy to talk through at a show and tell. They also make sense on their own, so can be shared and understood easily by people who miss your presentation.

As sprints go by, your collection of slide decks will provide a record of what you've learned about your users. This is useful because researchers on an agile team won't have time to write research reports (though they might produce brief research summaries).

Structuring research slides

When preparing findings for a show and tell, answer the basic questions of 'who', 'what', 'when', 'where', 'why' and 'how'.

Each findings slide should include:

• a headline that communicates something you've learned
• one or two sentences that describe the essential facts of the finding
• one or two sentences that explain its importance and any consequences
• a relevant photo or screenshot of what you were testing, or a quote from a participant.

You might also want to include:

• analytics data that supports your findings
• design work or sketches for any potential solutions
• short video clips from your research (one or two minutes is usually enough)
• summaries of other research which is relevant to your team's work

Focus every finding on your users. Try to explain who they are, what they do, how they think, what they need and what happened during the session.

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Source: Sharing user research findings