How to Share Research Findings from Interview Videos

The general concept of sharing research findings is that you need to extract the key takeaways from the deep, granular details, and present those insights in a way that makes sense for your audience. This typically includes:

• Understanding your audience's interest, your research goals, and how those align
• Adjusting your information for your audience's knowledge level
• Choosing the appropriate time and place to share those findings

But what researchers typically do — whether it be natural science or social science researchers — is they give too much information, or they present their information in a really boring way. (Think those long documents with walls of text.) This isn't engaging, and it won't drive the results you're hoping for; so you have to figure out how to relay those takeaways in a more compelling way to make an impact and get buy-in.

For a certain class of researchers — social scientists, market researchers, UI/UX researchers, customer researchers, user researchers, or anybody who conducts long-form interviews with real research participants — the best way to share findings that actually make an impact is by extracting the most important clips from your interviews and sharing that footage.

Video is the best way to genuinely capture your interactions with your study participants and their truest feelings on the subject because it allows you to relay participants' opinions in their own words, and it's much more influential than text on a screen.

But editing interview videos and creating polished presentations from your library of footage is a challenging and time-consuming task, even more so for researchers who don't have a video editing background.

As a result, researchers have to:

1. Learn the ins and outs of video editing to do this more efficiently.
2. Find the budget for professional video editing and wait around for an editor to assist.
3. Forego video altogether, and instead, pull audio snippets or include quotes in a Powerpoint or infographic.

So we made Reduct to help researchers utilize their research footage more efficiently: Our online, word-based video editor lets you securely store all of their footage in the cloud, collaborate with other researchers, create engaging presentations from your research, and share those presentations directly from our platform.

This article walks you through how to share research findings in a more compelling way with Reduct. At the end, we'll also give you some general tips on making valuable research presentations (skip to that section here) and advice to sell the value of your research and normalize those conversations in your organization (skip to that section here).

Reduct helps you share research findings that have an impact by letting you make engaging, memorable highlight reels from your research footage. To demo our features and see how simple it is to share research findings with Reduct.

A Video Editor Built for Sharing Research: Reduct.Video

Reduct is not just an online video editor, it"s an all-in-one video transcription, analysis, and editing software (that"s actually built by researchers) designed specifically to help researchers easily and quickly share key parts of their work through relevant video clips. You can use our platform to:

• Transcribe all of your interview videos and research footage
• Review transcripts for important takeaways
• Create video clips or highlight reels extremely easily just by editing your video's transcript

Then, all sharing from our platform is completely free: You can share video presentations with other team members or stakeholders and get your information in the appropriate hands without worrying about share limits or extra fees.

Let's walk through the process of synthesizing and sharing research findings in Reduct so you can see exactly how it's done.

1. Store All of Your Related Footage & Findings In One Place

First things first, you can upload all of your interview videos and research footage to Reduct by importing files from your computer or connecting Reduct with a cloud storage drive (e.g., Dropbox, Box, GDrive). We also have a one-click import option for Zoom if you conduct your research remotely and have a lot of Zoom recordings to edit.

We allow unlimited storage space, so our platform is ideal for researchers who have hundreds of recordings and hours of footage to keep track of, and you can keep your library organized by grouping all of your recordings in Project-Based Folders. As the name suggests, these are individual folders for each of your research projects; they hold not only your research footage, but also the corresponding transcript and associated video clips/Reduct Reels, so all of your research work is housed in one spot.

Project-Based Folders not only improve organization, but they simplify sharing because they allow you to add other team members to whole projects instead of individual recordings. More on that in the next section.

2. Loop In Other Team Members

If you work with other researchers, you can add them to your projects and control exactly how they can contribute with User Permissions. The four user roles include:

Then, our Presence feature lets teams work on data analysis and edits together by displaying what other users are doing in the transcript in real-time.

Now to talk transcripts.

3. Transcribe Your Footage for Easier Analysis

Once you upload your recordings to Reduct, our AI software automatically begins transcribing your videos to text.

We offer computer transcription by default — it's about 85% accurate and on par with the industry standard for quality — but you can also opt for our human transcription service if you need a really high-quality transcript (99% accurate) or you're working with unclear audio (i.e., audio with background noise, multiple speakers, speakers with accents, or speakers who use a lot of jargon words).

We offer the most affordable overnight human transcription service available — $1 per minute of audio — and guarantee transcripts within 24 hours (although many are ready much sooner than that). And our human transcription service is completely secure because we make sure that no single transcriber has access to your entire audio file.

Here's how our human transcription works:

1. We break your audio up into 5-minute chunks and send each chunk off to a professional human transcriptionist.
2. Each transcriber listens to their chunk of audio and transcribes the audio to text, assigning speaker names where possible.
3. Senior transcribers do a round of quality control to ensure all chunks are error-free.
4. Next, we piece the transcript back together and use AI software to double-check the transcript text for accuracy and assign appropriate speaker names throughout.
5. Then we send the transcript back to you!

Not to mention, all of our transcripts are editable, so if you want to make changes or remove speaker names to keep participants' info confidential, you can do that with a few keystrokes.

You can also read our other post to learn more about transcribing interviews for qualitative research.

4. Pinpoint the Most Important Moments (That You'll Share Via Video In the Next Step)

After your transcript is ready, you can review your video footage with the accompanying transcript and highlight all of the moments that stick out to you. When you make a highlight within the transcript, Reduct will automatically pull and save that video clip as a Highlight.

This is so much easier than reviewing footage and pulling clips manually: In traditional video editors, you have to do the cumbersome paper edit and deal with the tedious clip-and-play process of finding the most precise moments to cut your footage and playing it back to make sure it flows well for viewers. But in Reduct you can watch your video as you review the transcript and simply extract clips like you'd highlight words in a text document — we do the hard work for you.

Then, you can add tags to Highlights to categorize findings, detect patterns between recordings, and improve video searchability — our platform also lets you create a codebook to standardize tagging habits so everybody's using the same language to categorize clips.

Once you've reviewed your transcript, you can:

• Share individual Highlights if you want to send off a quick snippet
• Download Highlights if you want clips from your research for social media or other online platforms
• Combine Highlights into a Reduct Reel if you want to make a longer presentation to convey research results

Note: One of our most useful features for researchers is Fuzzy Search. Although it's standard practice for researchers to do a careful analysis of their video transcripts before putting together a research presentation and sharing findings, Fuzzy Search makes it easy to search back through footage after that initial review.

If you have multiple recordings and dozens of research participants to remember, it can be hard to recall exact quotes and phrasing of important moments. But you can use Fuzzy Search to scan back through your videos/transcripts by theme. For example, if you were to type "sports" into Fuzzy Search, we'd bring you everything related to baseball, football, lacrosse, soccer (the list goes on) so you can find everything relevant to your research on sports.

Fuzzy Search is also helpful because it aids cross-transcript analysis: Instead of opening up each transcript and searching one by one, you can utilize Fuzzy Search to scan through all of your recordings in a particular folder in one fell swoop. This makes it a lot easier to pinpoint patterns between recordings and catch details you might have overlooked.

5. Put Together an Engaging Highlight Reel with Your Findings

As we mentioned in the section above, you can use Highlights to create longer video stories (a.k.a. Reduct Reels).

This process is as easy as dragging and dropping your video clips into sequence. You can combine Highlights from one video source or multiple different videos, our side-bar search lets you filter down through your library of Highlights and pull what you need.

This is also vastly different than working in a traditional video editor — as we mentioned above, clipping video footage can be an extremely tedious process when you're tasked with trimming footage at the exact precise second to create a seamless snippet. And combining those clips can get even more difficult: You have to trim footage in a way that it flows from clip to clip and find a way to string together your clips in a way that makes sense for viewers. Reduct simplifies this entire process by letting you work with the clips you pull during analysis and use them for one video story, and our platform creates transitions between clips for you.

You can arrange and re-arrange clips as much as you want, and use our Strikethrough feature to edit out the portions of video you don't need. This is helpful for clips that have a valuable piece of information that's cluttered by unrelated details or filler words — you can simply "delete" the extra content the same way you would in a word doc. (But don't worry, all edits in Reduct are non-destructive, so you can un-do Strikethrough changes at any time and make new tweaks.)

When putting together your research presentation, you can also insert slides if you want to provide more detail for viewers or add visual aids such as images or graphs. We've seen researchers use text slides to introduce their research question, the goal of their research, and their research methods. But you can also use text slides to introduce or transition between topics, or include more background on participants.

Our platform automatically enables captions for you by pulling transcript text into your Reduct Reel. This improves accessibility, especially if you intend on publishing your presentation across the web, and the overall user experience because it allows viewers to read along as they play your presentation.

Read More: How to Edit an Interview Video in 5 Simple Steps

6. Send Your Presentation Off for Feedback

Once your presentation is ready to be shared, you can send it off to whoever you need by copying and pasting the unique share link — this makes dissemination quick and saves you from the tedious task of emailing large zip files or sending thumb drives via snail mail*.* And remember, we allow for unlimited sharing, so you can send this share link one or one hundred times and never get charged extra.

Note: You can also customize the thumbnail image and Reel name when sharing video presentations.

Our share links work across email platforms like Gmail, messenger apps like Slack, and workspace collaboration tools like Trello. When end users open this link, they can view your Reduct Reel with the interactive transcript in the Reduct portal. They can also change the playback speed if they want to review the presentation more quickly.

Sending the transcript with the video allows end-users to review on their own terms: They can search through the transcript for the info they're most interested in, skip around, or play the presentation without audio. This makes it far more likely that end-users will actually watch (and stay interested in) your research presentation, as they can skim the transcript to understand what's covered and know they're not buckling in for an hour-long TED talk with no option to fast forward.

It's important to note that you can still make edits to Reduct Reels after sending share links. All edits are automatically reflected across live share links so you don't have to re-send your presentation every time you make a tweak.

If you want to publish your video presentation online, you can download it from the platform and host it across the web — we offer 1080p exports using the .mp4 format. When downloading, you can choose to download the video file, audio file, or transcript, or all three.

Want to walk through the Reduct platform and try out word-based editing tools for yourself? Get started on your first research project and start leveraging your interview footage.

Other Tips for Sharing Research Findings & Driving Change

Before sitting down to create your research presentation, you should have a plan. Consider some of these tips to make the process smoother:

• Understand your research goals — What are you trying to accomplish with your research? What action are you trying to elicit from viewers?
• Take note of your target audience(s) — Are you sharing this information with peers or policymakers or disseminating research findings across a wider audience?
• Write for that audience(s) and their knowledge level — Utilize plain language when writing to stakeholders or other non-researchers. If you're too jargon-heavy, viewers can get lost in the lingo.
• Put together a "storyline" for your presentation — What info do you want to include? In what order are you going to present findings?
• Keep research findings neat and organized — If including slides in your presentation, keep them concise and clear: One idea per slide with minimal amounts of information. Showcase the main highlights and leave smaller details for later.
• Include clear study results and recommendations for change — This is arguably the most important because if viewers are unclear of what they should do with research findings, the entire process of creating and sharing your presentation is a flop. Tell viewers exactly why the findings of your research are important, and spell out the actions you want viewers to take to work towards the desired goal.
• Follow up — Don't just send research presentations off into the interweb and hope for a response. Chances are, the parties you share your research with — CEO, managers, and other stakeholders — have a lot on their plate, so sending a gentle reminder never hurts.
• Use feedback to your advantage — Even if sharing research findings doesn't go exactly as you planned, you can use feedback to improve future research efforts. Take notes on how and where you can improve, and next time around, your presentation may pack more of a punch.

Check out our other post if you're looking for tips on recording and transcribing interviews for optimal quality.

How to Sell the Value of Your Research

If research efforts/research findings aren't regularly talked about in your organization and you want to open up that conversation, we recommend doing some "research PR." This essentially involves putting together a research presentation on the value of research: It's an opportunity to explain what research you want to conduct, why it's valuable, and how you can leverage it to improve business. Once you get buy-in from others in your organization on the value of research, it's a lot easier to pitch new research studies and talk about findings.

Another way you can open up the conversation to discuss research findings is by sharing "research snacks," or little snippets from your research, to pique others' interest — and as interest builds, the conversation opens. Sharing research snacks makes it easier for people to learn more about your research in small doses, so they don't have to prepare for a whole rundown every time they ask for an update.

Making a habit of sending research snacks encourages a more research-centric culture and can open the doors for more opportunities. You can also learn more about "research PR" and normalizing research conversations in BlinkUX"s case study.

Try Reduct for Free

Reduct is an online video editing tool designed by researchers to support the research process: We offer fast and accurate video transcription, intuitive analysis tools, collaborative options, and a super easy video editing platform that lets you work with all of your research footage and create compelling presentations with your findings. To learn more about our platform and see if our software is a viable tool for your needs, contact us to get started with a free trial.