When kicking off a new research initiative, internal stakeholders and leadership have an optimistic viewpoint of how much they would like to be involved and how much information they would like to consume. Let’s face it, when rubber hits the road, this rarely happens. Even the biggest research champions don’t go back and watch all the videos or even fully read the reports. They are too busy. All of us are inundated with information these days, we can’t consume it all. Like our stakeholders and leadership, we are too busy.
As researchers, it is our ethical responsibility to make sure we are filling our stakeholders, leaders and design partners with empathy and understanding of users. If they don’t have the bandwidth, how do we make this happen? This is where a little creativity can save the day.
Why do we need to do this?
- Research without consumption across an organization is useless
- To build awareness of the value of research all the way to the top
- To collaborate across disciplines
How do we do this?
- Different modalities of sharing!
- Research Syncs: Create regularly scheduled meetings to share learnings. Keep the sessions informal, consider a lunch and learn. Have all of those who have conducted research recently share a summary of their approach, target users and learnings. End the meeting with an open discussion. Create a summary for those who are unable to attend.
- Create a bi-annual or quarterly “Research Digests” summarizing all the research conducted over the last 3-6 months with links to access more information for those who are interested. Limit this to a page to increase potential readership.
- Create a user interview snippet reel of examples of major trends from a research project. In just five minutes, you can let your users inform the rest of the team directly.
- Slack! Use a #userresearch slack channel to alert the team of new research in work, completed research and compelling learnings.
- Ask to be added to an all-hands agenda and share a snippet reel from user interviews, a short summary of research activities or impactful research moment or outcome.
What do we need to watch out for?
- Sharing out single cases or one-offs that could lead to a biased and inaccurate understanding of the user population. Make sure snippet reels share stories that accurately reflect findings.
- Overloading the research team with creating additional artifacts. Keep summaries and share outs lightweight.
What are we trying to achieve?
- Informed and empathetic leadership, personas that stick and become known entities throughout the company, leadership referencing interviews, collaboration requests from other disciplines, and ultimately a company-wide and continually growing interest in user research activities.