As Designers, we’re constantly communicating with people, either our managers, stakeholders, users or even ourselves. And once this is happening there’s a constant struggle between giving full attention and documenting tangible data from these conversations. Most of the data gotten from these conversations is usually raw and a bit messy. This article will explain ways that Designers can present the ‘messy’ data in a more formal and acceptable way. This can help in case study presentations, stakeholder meetings, and team sprints too.
Since we’re designers, we must ensure that our documentation is very concise, yet brief. We know that the focus span of users is very limited so there’s really no need for all the information. Keep the details for when you’re presenting in person. As far as written documentation is concerned, it should be brief, yet informative. Now, how can we achieve that?
Treating your research data as a product on its own is key to presenting it in its best form. This will help you know your target market and its purpose.
- Define your audience: This is the first step to a good and professional presentation of your research data. For example, if you’re seeking a new role and you conducted user interviews for a case study, your key audience is recruiters. You created a case study to showcase your skills and design process to recruiters and hiring managers. If recruiters are your target audience, refine your research data to be as brief as possible, but don't remove the core details.
- Tell an engaging story: Keep your readers locked in, don’t just list out what you did and who you interviewed. Use a story and guide us through without the conventional bullet points, and think of ways to carefully give your readers all the ‘tea’ without them getting distracted or tired of reading. Storytelling is a skill every designer should learn because we will always find ourselves giving explanations for our design decisions.
- Explain your research methodology: There are several methods that designers and researchers use to get raw data from users. A good research presentation would let the reader (or audience) know the methodology that was used to gather the raw data.
- Don’t give all the tea: Now, during the user research period, we get a lot of data from surveys, interviews, focus group meetings, etc. There’s a misconception that we need to show everything to prove our efficient research skills but in reality, it’ll be too messy and the point you’re to pass to the readers will be lost in all that messiness. Keep your raw findings and sieve out the core points. Showing the stakeholders or readers the whole unrefined data is not advised. Present summaries instead, which will show efficiency and time management.
5. Make it actionable: Don't give opinions. Give action points. The main aim of conducting user research is to extract users’ pain points and goals. When presenting your research data to your audience, make life easier for them (which is our goal as designers, anyway) by giving actionable points that you got from conducting the user research. These points are the solutions to the user’s pain points or business impact.
Conclusion
An average person has a focus span of 8 seconds. Data helps product teams understand their target users, reveals information about users’ pain points, unearths new trends, supports the data-driven design, and assures teams that their work is on track. So it's very important your data is well-refined and presented.
