You'll communicate throughout the design process. However, sharing research findings with your team, including both designers and developers, is a key step.
Share Your Research
Different companies have different approaches for sharing findings. You may often want to create a few versions of the same information in different formats to get it to the people who need to see it. You may also create multiple formats with the same audience in mind because everyone responds differently to information (some people love spreadsheets, while others want bullet points, and others a visual representation). Here's a sampling of ways you may want to share what you've uncovered with your team:
Via email
Shared GoogleDoc
Spreadsheet
On a Slack channel
Posters in the office
Presentation (emailed or presented in person)
Blog post
Internal newsletter
Highlights video
Design brief
The way you compile and share your research is likely something you'll want to refine continually—experiment with how to communicate as effectively as possible. You want to capture your audience's attention and get your key points across quickly and clearly. You also may want to consider including some background or history of the project or story to help contextualize what you're sharing.
What's most important is that you show actionable insights or recommendations, not raw interviews. By the time you're sharing information with the broader team, you should have already completed your analysis.
Real-World Examples
Steve Portigal's podcast Dollars to Donuts highlights people who work in user research, revealing valuable insights and inspiration in the way researchers work. He invited user and product researcher Gregg Bernstein for his first episode, who spent several years running research at MailChimp [newsletter service]. In the episode (which is also available in transcript form), Gregg discusses all the different ways his team shares their research, including emails, Evernote, and creative posters of personas.
MailChimp's fun twist on personas to hang around the office.
Gregg Bernstein has kept up his philosophy of getting his research in front of as many team members as possible with his new job at Vox Media where he wrote an article about Ambient Research. He also shares additional resources on his website.
The design research studio STBY created a highlight video to help make road safety issues a bit more real. While it's a low-budget video, it is very effective in showing the key issues, rather than just telling you what the problems are. Whenever you share your research findings, strive to bring the issues you uncovered to life for those who were not with you to see it for themselves. Also, note how the video ends by highlighting an opportunity.
Safety on the road video. Note how all the research was compiled into a brief, succinct video with key ideas. [2:10 min]
Let's recap!
Share your research and make people WANT to read it. Ultimately try to find what way of presenting your research works best within your team or for your client.
No one wants to read a long report. What you share should be succinct and to the point.
Show actionable insights or recommendations, NOT raw interviews.
You’ve seen in this last part how to use your results and share them to expand your project outcomes! Let's see what you've learned from this part with a quiz!
