Author
You may find the following scenario familiar.
After excitedly planning your user research, interviewing important stakeholders, carrying out surveys, carrying out user testing… the list goes on… you then report back your findings to much nodding and congratulating, only to find very little has changed after the dust settles and people have moved on to something else.
Lengthy recommendations reports have a tendency to be read once, thrown in a drawer, and forgotten about.
So how do we get this stuff to stick in people’s minds?
Keep things in plain sight
One option is to create graphical representations of findings such as personas and user journeys and stick them on your walls.
We’ve found that these poster versions should be super simple; just a few key points and a strong image.
The detail isn’t really that important. A website persona poster on a wall will remind members of a team of the website as a whole and how important it is, not just that it has certain types of user.
Extend scope
It’s easy to plan the end of a project with the delivery of a report. There’s a tidiness to it; all the work is done and here’s the document summarising it… bye!
But, if we bake in at least some follow-up work as part of the original project then it’s harder to ignore or forget about any recommendations for change.
Of course, it’s difficult to plan for follow-up work before we know what that work will be, but just including it – with some associated effort – means that it has to be considered.
Measure success
Associating measurements of success for your recommendations in a report does two things. Firstly, it assumes that they’re going to be implemented! This may sound like I’m stating the obvious, but if we talk in terms of when something is going to happen, rather than if, then in my experience, that thing is more likely to happen.
Secondly, it gives you the opportunity to give people (preferably specifically named people) actions; something that’s hard to ignore or forget about.
Measures of success, by their nature, are something that should be revisited regularly. We carry out annual reviews for some of our clients and many of the items included in the associated report are us revisiting the measures of success we set up many years previously.
Conclusion
User research is only valuable if it leads to meaningful action. By keeping findings visible, planning for follow-up from the start, and establishing clear measures of success, we can prevent our research from gathering dust.