And here we are, wrapping up this research-intensive Course 4 with a presentation. 🤣

Anyhow, we have learned that UX research is a never-ending process, and the more we iterate on our mistakes and our insights the more fruitful, user-centric designs we can produce.

Let's look at a few design-specific presentation pointers and move toward course 5.

Week 4: Sharing Research Insights for Better Designs

We can share our findings and research insights with the stakeholders in two different formats, presentations and research reports.

1. A good presentation will consist of 15-20 slides broken up into four sections: study details, themes, insights and recommendations, and an appendix.

2. A research report is a document with fewer visuals containing the same information as the presentation. Research reports will often place the summary of

   the research insights and recommendations before the detailed insights. This allows stakeholders to quickly read the actionable information.

Creating a Strong Presentation

Broadly, the presentation should include these slides:

1. The first slide should contain the title, date, and team members who worked on the research study.

2. The second slide should be the table of contents.

3. The next few slides will fall under the study details section:

   • The content in this section is majorly drawn from the research plan we created initially.

   • The first slide could be the project background and research goals.

   • The next slide can contain the research questions the study will answer the participant's demographic information, and the methodology followed. The methodology must contain a high-level overview of the procedure.

   • Use a few slides to show the prototype screenshot and design mocks tested.

4. We have made it to the theme section:

   • This is where we share the themes from the synthesis of our data.

   • Each theme must have its own slide. The theme is listed at the top as the header, and evidence to support the theme is provided in the bullets below.

   • Add a screenshot of the relevant screen from your prototype and highlight the area of interest.

   • We can also add a quote from the participant that supports the theme. A quote helps bring the theme to life in the words of someone experiencing the product firsthand.

5. The final section is insights and recommendations:

   • It's helpful to prioritize the research insights from the most urgent to the least

     urgent (P0 to P2).

   • A Priority Zero or P0 must be fixed for your product to work. These include insights that prevented the user from completing the main user flow or parts where the user felt tricked (deceptive patterns) or any parts of the design that were inequitable or inaccessible.

   • P1 and P2 do not stop the user flow, but addressing them would improve the user experience.

6. Next, we need to provide some recommendations to our stakeholders. Recommendations are actions we think the stakeholders should take based on our study (at least three).

7. Finally, add the thank you slide and the appendix.

We can create a research report with the same sections and headers that we just walked through just in a different format.

Add numeric data with defined metrics whereever possible. This data is important because it lends credibility to your study.

Present Research Insights

The upcoming step after creating a presentation is obviously to present it to the stakeholders. There are some good pointers given in the course, but I'm going to skip this, again for the sake of brevity. Public speaking and delivering magnetic presentations is a bottomless topic and should be explored in depth but with better resources.

Design iteration with new insights

After our internet-breaking presentation, we agreed on the insights to take action on along with the stakeholders. We also assigned different priorities to the insights and will start our iteration with the P0 ones.

Keep in mind this entire process of researching, synthesizing, and then iterating based on that research is a loop, not a line. We'll create prototypes learned from research and iterate on our designs many times.

We're going to make changes to our wireframes at this stage, not our low-fidelity prototype. Why? Think of an author writing a book. The writer doesn't update the binding of the book each time they edit a few words. Instead, the writer edits the words on the page. Once all the edits are complete, the pages are renumbered and bound into a book. It's similar for designers, wireframes are turned into a low-fidelity prototypes through connections. In the same way, pages are turned into a book through binding.

Here is my submission for this week's assignment. Go through it if you want to succeed in life, or don't if you don't care about three-legged puppies. (Note: Don't use or fall for deceptive patterns) 😉