The skill of creating strong research reports is one of the most important and valuable skills of a researcher. It is what characterizes and shows how high or low a researcher’s qualifications are.

It is incredibly important because it is the outcome of your work upon which all future decisions about the subject depend. As I said above, this is the most important part of a researcher’s job. Your stakeholders don’t care which method you used, they care about getting concrete steps of what to do next.

And in this post I would like to tell you how to make a report that will influence, interest and motivate your stakeholders to take action.

I very often encounter the idea that reports are just a formal process that is done because «that’s the way it’s done». But this is a profound mistake.

A good research report is one that tells you what you didn’t know beforehand.

Planning.

First, you need to understand — who is going to watch the report. This is very important. Each specialist in your company has different tasks and needs, so not always what is interesting for the product manager will also be interesting for the sales manager or the top manager.

At the first stage, you need to decide what key message you will put into your presentation. To do this, you can ask the questions:

Why will the reader themselves want to pay attention to my presentation?
What are his objectives, problems, needs and interests it addresses?

A sales manager is unlikely to care that users don’t like the blue button and don’t perceive it the way it was intended. Designers will like it better, and if you tell them that because the button is blue — lower conversions and sales drop, then you can generate their interest in seeing the presentation.

At the planning stage, the most important task is to determine what you want to tell and how it can be useful to those to whom you are going to tell it.

There is a certain formula that will help you a lot with this:

The key action of this report is to help {who you are going to show} see how {the goal that is important to whoever you are going to show}.

For example: The key action of this post is to help UX people see how they can make their presentations more interesting to stackholders and through them increase the impact of research in the company.

The most key thing you should take away from this step is that people care about their own problems and challenges. If your report helps in solving a problem or challenge, it’s a cool report that will make an impact.

Structure.

Structure in a research report is also incredibly important. Again, it’s not going to be forgotten that all 3 elements that I’m talking about are all connected and exist in synergy, complementing each other. They will not work separately from each other.

It’s worth beginning that any research builds on a certain structure. We receive a research request from a stakeholder with hypotheses, goals and problems that we need to test as part of the research. This will be some of the foundation of our presentation.

There are several rules for the design and composition of the research report.

Descriptions of content. At the beginning of the report — be sure to briefly state what this report is about, what its purpose is, and what will be inside.

In this way you have already a few first and important slides:

— Description of the study (objectives, methods, sample, date of the study);
— Main conclusions of the study (all the main conclusions of the study briefly and on one slide);

Next, we begin to make a presentation similar in structure to the one with which we received the research request:

— Hypotheses/objectives/problems (name of hypothesis/problem, description of hypothesis/problem, main conclusions from the study about the hypothesis/problem, quotes from respondents about the hypothesis/problem).

Next, after you’ve covered everything you were expected to cover, you can now move on to the «Unexpected Insights» slide. I call it the «Grail» in research reports. This is a very important slide that shows what you weren’t supposed to see. These slides have the same structure as the hypothesis slides, goal problems. You write the name of the insight, give it a brief description, write some conclusions from the study that explain, describe the insight, and prove its relevance with quotes from respondents or statistics.

And the last slide is recommendations. Also a key element of a strong research presentation. It’s important to understand that you, as the researcher, are the bridge between the business and the users. And it’s important that you can make quality recommendations about what users really want and what their problems are. The more qualitative recommendations you can make, the more influence you will have and the stronger the research culture will grow in your organization.

In recommendations, it’s important to state why this is what you want and not the other. You can do this with quotes, video clips that show how the user interacts with the interface and what problems they have, and statistical data.

Design.

The next step is more visual communication, which makes it easier to communicate your research thoughts.

In presentations, I recommend using evidence more often, namely quotes, video clips, statistical data, and so on. The value of any research is that we are communicating with users — and the more we can immerse our stakeholders in context and convey what our clients and users really feel — the more impact our presentation will have on them.

If we somehow summarize the types of presentation design, we can talk about qualitative and quantitative analyses. The design for each will be slightly different.

— Quantitative research involves displaying quantitative data: charts, graphs, and so on.

— Qualitative research imply displaying qualitative data through quotes from respondents, video snippets.

— Usability-testing involves displaying qualitative data through video clips and quotes from respondents.

And be sure to add a brief description of all mappings to explain what it refers to and what it’s for.

Conclusions.

Let’s summarize everything that has been said above:

— The report should be made specifically for the audience, so that it responds to its objectives, requests and problems.
— In the structure it is necessary to specify the description of the research, the main conclusions, a description of the hypotheses / goals / problems that were in the research brief, add a slide with “Unexpected Insights” and give recommendations for further action.
— All this is accompanied by evidence — quotes, video fragments, diagrams, and so on.

After implementing these steps — your presentations will be much more useful and will be able to have many times more impact on the audience.