5 Easy Tips for Communicating UX Findings to Teams

An important but undervalued skill in a designer’s toolbox is communicating UX research findings to collaborators and stakeholders. In any effective presentation, the designer must consider how to best present findings and optimize their impact on the end product. Let’s look at 5 tips to help you in your next presentation!

1. Consider Your Audience 

First of all, consider who will be attending the presentation–is the design team, the engineering partners, or clients? Depending on their level of subject matter expertise and closeness/authority over the teams working on the product directly, you must strategize how to get relevant information to the right person. The next step is strategizing the structure of your presentation. 

2. Reiterate Goals

In your presentation’s introduction, reiterate the goals of the study/research plan. What was the initial objective? Why is this data something that needed to be collected? Highlighting key points in a summary at the beginning of the presentation serves as an overview to the rest of the content. 

3. Prioritize Insights 

If you have a research background, it may seem clear to you how to interpret large swathes of data, but rarely will the team or stakeholders have the background (or patience) to look at chart after chart. Therefore, as the presenter, your role is to show the information and focus on why it matters. This means not just showing a particular chart but using data visualization, color, percentages, or other design elements to highlight why this piece of information matters. Pull out the key insights and order their severity to make sense of the information and your recommendations on how to tackle them, instead of throwing all the data out to the audience with ambiguous next steps.

4. Tell a Story

One way to engage your audience if you’ve uncovered any deeper insights is through a storytelling format. By using customer quotes or painting a picture of how a customer described their problem, you can help develop deeper empathy between a team that might be more disconnected from the background information behind the data. 

A common storytelling structure is the story arc: where the action/tension rises over time till it reaches an “aha!” moment. This technique is especially powerful at the beginning of a process, and helps the team understand why they are doing this particular piece of work and how it can potentially impact the customer. 

Conclusion

Overall, using a concise, information presentation catered to your audience helps them make the most impact after research has been conducted. Your role should focus on prioritizing the information clearly–showing both data and meaning, as making sure the right team leads understand the severity of any insights that came out of your findings.

Nail That Presentation!

We have a huge collection of tutorials and articles to help you prepare the best possible presentation and get standing ovations from all your audiences: