Some learnings which are left out by the stakeholders due to lack of time may be more interesting to know sometimes. Knowing this and not being able to do anything about it can be a User Researcher dilemma.

Disclaimer: I am trying to write about something which I feel is true about how some research efforts go wasted no matter how much we try due to little negligence or lack of bandwidth and time from the researchers as well as from the decision-makers in a company. These are just my thoughts. I hope at least some user researcher among the readers of this article would be able to resonate with me here.

Have you ever felt like this? You have conducted in-depth research which took you a very long time( at least -2 months or more) where you found many interesting learnings of which some you knew for sure that might be interesting for the stakeholders as the stakeholders initially had shown high interest. But later they did not pay much attention to what the research outcomes were and the recommendations that came for the product or the services even after you gave a very long presentation with insights that can really be interesting were not given the attention that they needed. This happens usually when you conduct qualitative research. You also feel that the insights that you have shared had not been taken seriously and hence not used to build strategies or ask the next set of questions to impact growth. You had so many things to say but you had to wrap up and move on just to keep pace with the other teams.

Most senior researchers would then suggest things like these:

• Keep your presentation short and crisp as nobody likes to read or listen to long presentations.
• Present the high-level takeaways up front so that different teams who attend the presentation can focus on only what they are looking for or at least the actionable items that the teams individually or as a whole are looking to get.
• Keep sharing regular preliminary insights with the stakeholders so that you can start working on some of the learnings even before you give the final presentation. This doesn’t keep the stakeholders waiting until you present all the insights and the following recommendations and next steps.

— We do things like sharing the recordings, sharing all learning documents through emails with the teams. But how much of that is actually consumed? Who cross-checks on that? To make proper research consumption the required effort or bandwidth is very high for the User research team as well as the Decision Makers(or the stakeholders).

There are more things Researchers do to make sure that stakeholders end up consuming most of the learnings, at least the high-priority ones out of a conducted research. This works well, no denying that. But they also sometimes compromise some learnings as they are kept in the not-so-important category of insights(which you feel that can be later looked at when time permits).

Can this impact the business in any way is the question to be asked.

The answer is Yes, it may. It may not allow teams to consume the maximum out of the research. It may lead to inaction and indecision.

Now, what do we mean by not consuming maximum out of a research? By that we mean:

a) Being able to get access to learnings that may be very interesting — to use as it is to build strategies to solve problems, and further dig deep to convert them into actionable items later.

b) Not missing out on any possibilities to impact business growth via User Research.

We cannot solve all the problems through one research — nor can we build all the strategies or look into all areas of a product or get a complete understanding of our users in just one conducted research. So it's ok to share some high-level learnings and keep sharing them phase by phase. Understanding where to fit them into the product roadmap is the key.

Inaction is created during User Research when — stakeholders do not know about important learnings(which may have got neglected as unnecessary research learning) on to base a strategy or next round of research. This can lead to the non-discovery of certain areas or scopes to tap into to help a business grow. But who should care? (You can leave an answer in the comments section after reading this article)

Indecision is created during User Research when — Stakeholders are not able to take a confident decision or any decision at all based on the learnings shared with them. This rarely happens though as they(stakeholders)usually come with a mindset to gather some actionable insights out of a User Research Presentation and we all know that even an insight can be further strengthened by adding more context and depth to be used for decision-making.

But do we care? Even if we want to who has the time to do that? This is what most researchers end up feeling or are made to feel at the end of an entire cycle of User Research. The feeling is like — you have worked so hard on something and people didn’t even care to look through the whole thing. Makes you feel like not working so hard the next time — just give stakeholders the actionable takeaways and get the job done. But when the time will come to discuss the ROI of user research people do question and that is when they care. So it is very important for a User Researcher to take this situation seriously. The aim should be to gradually make more impact on the business.

Unnecessary learnings? Do they exist?

Most User researchers while processing and making sense of the insights tend to take a decision along with the research team as well as some stakeholders on what they would present on the big presentation day. They try to not make a long and boring presentation and also focus on answering only those questions which they know the stakeholders are looking for to make certain decisions(irrespective of the departments). If the research conducted was qualitative or even mixed in nature and it contained multiple methodologies with more people there can be certain emerging insights that have the potential to be further investigated or insights or learnings that don’t answer the most important stakeholder questions at the moment are mostly not shared or added to the presentations. Hence they are also tagged as unnecessary at the moment due to a lack of time to process them. There may be further investigation on those unpresented insights later but that's something which we are not sure of.

So yes, unnecessary learning, exists only when you lack time and bandwidth or when there are biases in how we perceive the learnings of User Research at different hierarchy levels inside a research team or amongst decision-makers.

Have you ever heard these from a stakeholder —

“ Hey that learning is interesting, why didn’t you add it to the presentation?”

“Just show me the high-level learnings. I have to rush to another meeting after this presentation”.

In these situations do you feel like telling them this? —

“ Hey please listen, I feel knowing the other learnings would be also very useful for the business”

The decision maker if very kind may then also tell you things like —

“Share the document I will go through it later when I have time”.

This also happens

In companies where there are multiple members in the research team or multiple teams working on a project, there are — Skip-level presentations which happen most of the time and different types of decision-making biases filter the learnings before the decision makers see the final presentations —By skip level presentations I mean presentations where one senior member checks the research learnings, consumes them and filters them before presenting it to other stakeholders.

In most cases, the main decision-makers only end up seeing the very high-level insights(which may be biased, what we think are important may be important but there may be things that can be even more important for decision-makers to know). In some worst cases, none of the learnings from conducted research reaches the decision makers due to changes in priority or the product roadmap. This may also lead to situations where during performance evaluation — some researchers may get questioned regarding what impactful research had they conducted over a period of time.

— We need to know how to deal with the reports and make the research findings relevant to the business at the right time. But what about other unrelevent findings? Where do they go? Do we conduct another research to further dig onto them? Do we ask more questions? Should we be the only ones asking those questions? Or should others too join and have a brainstorming session before flushing out the so-called unrelevant learnings or the not-so-important present learnings?

Sharing an experience where things changed due to a sudden lack of priority and indecision among decision-makers — makes learning consumption even more difficult.

Once when working as a User Researcher for BYJU’S (The most popular educational app in India) on a particular research I realized that most of the learnings which I wanted to share with the team were not fully utilized. The research was conducted to understand whether the EPIC reading app can be used by Indian kids who also may or may not be using BYJUS. There were multiple research questions asked related to — usability, motivation to use the app, behavioral factors as well as attitudes toward using the app. We also wanted to understand our users, who they are in person — their likes, dislikes, abilities, and how they make decisions — hence the scope of the research was huge and we came to know that while planning the research.

The answers from the research would have helped the BYJU’S team decide whether they should launch the Epic app on their tablets and whether they would need to make some changes to the app to be easily used by the Indian audience. We made multiple documents with tons of qualitative research insights, multiple affinity mappings, journey maps, and emerging archetypes which we wanted to show to the stakeholders. We also developed a prioritization matrix of around 50 learnings that came out of the research(which we felt would be very useful to know for multiple stakeholders across teams at BYJU’S. But guess what, we couldn’t present even half of the learnings that we had to present in front of the stakeholders. We ended up selecting some high-level learnings which the team felt will be useful to present that too only within the department. Stakeholders didn’t even get to know much about it. How was the researcher feeling then?

“I have wasted lots of time conducting research that could not even be consumed by the stakeholders. I have wasted time and what would my manager who keeps track of the ROI of the research team think I had been doing all this time”

Although the documents were later shared people lost interest and consumed only parts of the huge chunk of learnings gathered in that research.

Wasted time and effort? Add to researchers' fatigue? Questions on researchers' ability to help build the right strategy or take the next step?

But why this happened?

Should researchers resist the temptation to over-research? But what's wrong with that? Did the above situation happen due to a lack of internal discussions during the research process? Lazy stakeholders or lack of proper vision? (Please do share your opinion in the comments section).

Things that we can do to reduce scenarios where research is not properly consumed or increase research consumption.

There needs to be a joint effort. Lots of stakeholder orientation is required from the beginning, from the time the User Research function is set.

Who will take up the initiative?

Of course the User Research Team!

Things a User Research Team can do which can impact User Research Consumption

— Build good friendly relationships with the Decision Makers by talking to them on regular basis, and joining their meetings whenever possible.

— Lots of briefing meetings — supporting decision makers in work beyond the research results — a short explanation of why I think it might be of interest to them(for individual stakeholders or teams) — visualize the learnings(if used correctly can be impactful)

How can the stakeholders(can also be a researcher) impact the Impact of User Research?

a) Be attentive during research presentations, if you can’t then at least go through the recordings or the presentation later. It may help a lot.

b) It’s our research attitude. Researchers keep trying to do that, stakeholders can do their bits too. The intent of the decision-makers also matters.

c) Trust us, every single bit of information can be useful. Do not miss any. Even if sometimes we share docs please do go through them. Putting everything on a presentation calls for coffee.

d) Make it a habit to read research documents that contains all learnings regularly. Having a repository that is easily consumable can be a good idea to make this habit formation easier.

e) Brainstorming and discussion on visually represented research learnings.

f) Not to sleep on the learnings. Follow-ups with the research team on research learnings. Multiple times if needed(Not to forget them after a presentation).

The point isn’t to follow all of these but rather to select those that will help you reach the decision-makers as well as the ones who will be building the strategies and executing them and hence increase the impact of research.

To learn about how to use User Research to build strategies to Hook a user to your service/product you can read this article.

To learn about how to reduce biases while conducting User Research you can read this article.