Storytelling Research Results to Get Stakeholder Buy-In (Mini Workshop)
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My slides from DCUX 2019 to share my storytelling process that has aided buy-in from skeptical stakeholders. Building empathy is the number one way to get that buy-in and motivation to change things for our customers and users.
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Storytelling Research Results to Get Stakeholder Buy-In (Mini Workshop)
- 1. Storytelling Research Results to Win Stakeholder Buy-In November 9, 2019 DCUX @stephaniempratt #DCUX2019
- 3. Who Am I? *Bitmoji for the Image
- 5. The Old Way Observed Problem Opportunity 3 out of 5 participants Couldn’t make it past the sign up screen Do x, y, z 2 out of 5 participants Got stuck on the authentication page Do x, y, z
- 6. Insert: Storytelling Sarah, Shoe Shopper Comic made at makebeliefscomix.com
- 8. Structure
- 9. Example 1: Usability Testing
- 10. Sarah the Shoe Shopper Comic made at makebeliefscomix.com 1 Provide Background
- 13. 3 out of 5 participants were confused by not seeing sneakers in the style profile when looking for sneakers. 3 Follow Up with Data
- 15. 2 out of 5 participants were not able to immediately identify the “sneakers” filter on the left hand side when navigating to shoes. 3 Follow Up with Data
- 20. Interview Insights & Observations ● People are worried about others judging them if they make mistakes if they try yoga ● People desire to experience the calm effects of yoga 3 Follow Up with Data
- 21. Structure
- 22. Apply this to all sorts of research methods ● Usability testing ● Interviews ● Field Studies / Contextual Inquiry ● Diary Studies ● Anything you can narrate, can be told as a story
- 24. Practice: Usability Testing - The Bouqs Task: You want to purchase flowers to arrive at a close family member’s home on their birthday next Wednesday in zip code 22209. 3 out of 5 participants selected flowers that couldn’t be delivered on time to that zip code 2 out of 5 participants didn’t select a delivery date before adding to basket, so had to repeat the step 1 out of 5 participants were unable to complete the process
- 25. Practice: Interviews - Travel Experience You conducted deep research with people about travel. Here’s what you learned: ● People get frustrated when their flight is delayed without communication for why or fixed time estimates to explore or do something else with their time ● People do not like to wait for baggage or pay baggage fees ● People like it when airlines offer amenities like chargers at their seat ● Something else you like or don’t like about travel :)
- 26. Thank you! Stephanie M. Pratt @stephaniempratt stephaniempratt.com
Editor's Notes
- My name is Stephanie Pratt. I’m here to share with you the method I have created to storytell research results with stakeholders to build buy in. The first portion of this session will be talk and sharing examples, the second half will be hands on trying to craft some stories of your own.
- The problem - Feeling like this after presenting research results to stakeholders that aren’t fully invested in the value of research. Having been so excited about finding patterns in the results and wanting to share them back to the team to only get responses like “How many people did you test with?” “Would this person be a customer of ours anyway?” “It’s only a few people’s opinions”. Raise your hand if you’d had this UX Researcher moment?
- Who am I to tell you how to solve this problem? I am the Senior Lead of UX Research at GoCanvas building out the research capability of the organization. I have applied research skills in varying fidelities at a variety of organizations, I’ve had experience in government contracting, insurance, and tech startups. I’ve also been involved with UXPA DC for many years, the last few leading the mentorship program. In each of my roles, I’ve had to sell UX Research to some degree, some more than others, due to different UX maturity levels. But one thing I’ve learned over my years of experience is how to present research to different types of stakeholders. Today I’m going to share my techniques in presenting research results to those who are not as bought in to research as a whole. This idea was formulated and applied in my work at different organizations. I did this because I was facing the problem I shared with you before and was inspired by a talk at a UXPA DC event on making ideas stick in 2014. My research results were not making an impact, and once I started sharing them as stories, the response to the results completely changed.
- Part of the solution to this problem is to reframe how you think about yourself as a researcher. Yes, your job is to learn about the people who use your product and services and then built insights off of those learnings. The real job? That’s making everyone else in your organization feel empathy for those people. Giving your colleagues the motivation to make the people who use your products’ lives better. Your research results only matter if there is action on them, and by bringing everyone into the empathy world with you, you can do this successfully. Storytelling is a way to do that.
- Presenting research results like this or in bullet pointed lists only works if you have the trust, relationship, and strong buy in from the stakeholders. Fortunately, I am lucky enough to be able to do similar outputs like this now for my product managers, but it hasn’t always been this way. In the past when I’ve done something like this, I would get “oh, that’s only 3 people though” or other types of push backs on the results, usually surrounding the number of participants in qualitative research. There are other things you can use to educate stakeholders, but that is for another talk, not this one. :)
- When faced with this challenge I decided to try a new way of reporting. I turned the results into a children’s story format - think one or two sentences per slide. I would use a comic like this to set the tone of the character, which represents people in the user research. This is not a persona, but just a way to communicate the results. I would use a comic, like this one from makebelifecomix.com but have used hand drawn comics in the past to illustrate these as well.
- I knew this was on point, as when I read the results as a story to stakeholders, the reactions were priceless. From what used to be a response like “OK, thank you”, turned into a “Wow, yeah, I’d be frustrated if that happened to me.” or “Oh, yeah, I could see myself feeling like that in that situation.” These stories made it way easier to motivate the stakeholders to make changes. I’ve had stories like this escalate in the chain of command to share the research insights in a way that everyone can understand.
- Go over structure General structure - I modify this a bit depending on the research method, which I will show you a couple examples to illustrate. This is what has worked for me, but feel free to put your own spin on it as you begin to try this out in your own work. We’ll have some time to practice your own stories after a couple examples.
- Here are some FAKE example I made up to illustrate the point.
- Sarah wanted to get a new pair of sneakers for her wardrobe. She landed on shoedazzle and clicked on the get started button.
- She started filling out a style profile, yet all the shoes she saw were heels, not sneakers. “Does this website even sell sneakers?” she said.
- Sarah then clicked on “Shoes” in the top navigation to see a list of new arrivals. “Why is it so hard to find sneakers?” she thought.
- Go over example of background image Repeat these steps until you’ve walked through the experience that the character would realistically go through
- Interviews, I may approach a little differently. I will narrate the story first, then share the supporting evidence after, that way the stakeholders can get immersed in the story without the break ups that make sense with usability testing output. Again, here is another example of research output from fake research.
- Here is Tina. She is trying a yoga class for the very first time. She is a little nervous, because it is something unfamiliar to her.
- At the start of class, Tina is feeling good. She is learning how to breathe slowly and bring her mind into the present moment.
- After the class gets going, she feels nervous and unsteady. “What if other people are judging me for not doing this right?” she thinks.
- After going through an entire story of narrating Tina’s experiences through the experiences of the yoga class, then I would follow up with some data including the insights. The story I shared is trunkated to illustrate, but a similar research effort that you conducted could have a longer story. This an example of what some insights could be for a project where you’re studying the experience of going to a yoga class for the first time and encouraging more people to try yoga.
- Again, here is my structure/formula. The two stories I shared followed this with some modifications. Reporting usability testing results followed this flow 100%, sharing interview results, I would follow this more linearly to tell the story first for immersion, then follow up with the insights of that experience.
- I have done hand drawn sketches and imagery to describe people’s experiences at different types of events regarding their safety from experiences or near miss experience. To share this with the entire company, I created stories to capture the emotions that people felt in those different contexts to illustrate the empathy of when someone would need to use a safety related app and their mental state.
- Break into groups of 2 or 3. I’m going to give you some fake research results that you can use to craft a story.
- 15 minutes to practice Fake insights from usability testing this flower delivery service website. *they have changed their UI since I created this fake usability test results for this talk and they have actually added a feature here, so maybe they listened to my fake usability test results ;)
- Imagine you conducted research on behalf of an airline company, such as Southwest, Jetblue, or American AIrlines. Here are some fake insights that you found from your deep research. 15 minutes to practice.
- Go over structure General structure - I modify this a bit depending on the research method, which I will show you a couple examples to illustrate. This is what has worked for me, but feel free to put your own spin on it as you begin to try this out in your own work. We’ll have some time to practice your own stories after a couple examples.