6 Research Storytelling Tips
YouTube videos, Instagram stories, Facebook stories — the more we evolve technically and culturally, the more important “story” becomes to how we communicate all kinds of information. Today’s audiences — whether it’s your friends online or your clients in a presentation — are accustomed to emotionally compelling, visually rich, interactive, dynamic narratives. If your goal is to present your UX research in a way that moves teams to action, a boardroom brief with a few dry charts won’t cut it.
Here are six tips to make your next research presentation more impactful:
1. Create an emotional connection to your participants and their needs.
Emotional connections are more powerful than the data, the facts and the evidence that you will present. Interview highlight clips are terrific to connect your audience with study participants. When the team hears a participant’s tone of voice and sees their expressions and gestures, it creates this connection, helps them see how their job relates to the people we are designing for, triggers recall, and helps them move into action.
2. Combine static and dynamic visuals.
With modern presentation tech, there’s no reason to limit yourself to static visuals; you can (and should!) add dynamic content as well. That could be a video of a demo, an interactive click-through prototype, highlight reels for audio files, or maybe even an animation. Mix these in with your static visual standbys — charts, graphs, photos, illustrations, wireframes — to keep the presentation (and the story) alive and moving.
3. Use visuals as a framework.
Instead of simply snazzier versions of raw data destined for an appendix, think of charts, flowcharts, graphs and other static visuals as frameworks to illustrate your narratives by organizing data in different ways. A task flow analysis is a great example of a storytelling flowchart. A chart or graph could be used to contrast two options, points of view, or methods; or to demonstrate the pain against the opportunity; or show the rational against the emotional. Contrast creates tension. Tension separates a story from a sequence of events. Oftentimes, visual tension is more moving than narrative tension. Try it!
4. Expect your visuals to do more than break up the page.
Unique visuals tied to specific information will help people remember the important presentation points. Go a step beyond “visual interest” and use a series of related images as a memorable storytelling hook. (One of my favorite recent presentations involved cartoon tomatoes and a song reference from the 30s. And it totally worked.) Every visual should support your story. Graphics that ONLY serve as ornaments can detract more from the presentation than they add.
5. Share portions of the research journey.
Consider integrating visuals of your affinity diagrams or your mind maps or workshop artifacts. Or share a series of annotated screenshots to illustrate the progress of a rolling research program. Revealing the inside story of your journey can build significant buy-in and credibility. This is particularly important in a case study, where you want to demonstrate your thinking, discuss key decisions and collaborators, and/or “how you got there.” The journey can reveal as much as the destination.
6. Finally, don’t let numbers turn your great story into a tall tale.
In qualitative research, we gather data from fewer people compared to quantitative research. Our research is meaningful for its depth, but is not statistically relevant. Saying, “eight out of 10 people,” though it may be true for your study population, can be misunderstood as “80% of all people,” and that might not be the case. (If you do choose to report on numbers specifically, make sure to include a disclaimer in your report. Clarity and credibility are key to your story!)
Remember, our number-one goal is to get people to act on our learnings. So we want to make our research as interesting, memorable and easy-to-digest as possible, reducing friction and helping the team move forward.
This week, Ask Like A Pro students completed the sixth workshop in the series, called “Present.” The All-Ins will present their final research learnings to UsabilityHub, our project sponsor for this cohort. It's incredibly exciting to see them bring their 71 research participants to life and to watch their hard work take shape!
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