How to make your research consumable with research snacks
September 2019
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2 min read
We know what it’s like to wrap up a full day of research interviews during your product development sprint. Your team’s on a tight timeline and moving fast. And as a researcher, you want to share insights with your team before they make a decision and move on.
Even with the best intentions, nobody wants to read yet another long slide deck before heading home Tuesday evening in the middle of the sprint.
And if we’re being honest, are we even following UX best practices when we share our findings? Possibly not.
At Reduct’s first Research, Camera, Action! event, we heard from Rannie Teodoro, a Senior UX Research Manager at Thumbtack, who wondered exactly that:
“I wonder how many times have we really just shared our findings via a document, or a really dense deck, when we really aren't following our own UX principles about how people consume and interact with information.”
A desire for more consumable insights led the Thumbtack UX Research team to try something new with their stakeholders—they call it sharing “research snacks.” Here is Jordan Berry, Senior Experience Researcher at Thumbtack, in her own words:
Thumbtack’s research snacks get noticed—especially when paired with a cookie emoji 🍪! These 30-second video snippets highlight a wider pattern among Thumbtack’s customers. Jordan and the team typically share their research snacks over 5-10 different Slack channels, tagging relevant stakeholders in the process. Snacks get engineers’ attention and spark larger conversations within their company—all this from a single short video.
This isn’t the first time at Reduct that we’ve heard video can be mightier than the pen. Kathleen, a UX researcher at an augmented reality software company, found that her prior methods of sharing qualitative research—textual quotes, spreadsheets … you know the drill—weren’t engaging her stakeholders as much as they could be.
Using Reduct to create a video of her users’ pain points, she shared it in her user research Slack channel. This single video insight sparked conversations both inside Slack (with engineers and members of the sales team chiming in!) and offline across her office.
The insights relayed in the video actually created internal alignment on product strategy in a way that was more user-centered than before: “it really helped us kind of see together as a company like what an overarching strategy might be, just based-off of one video, which I thought was really incredible. Like it helped push forward an agenda that was more in favor of the user than what I had seen previously.”
Video is powerful and research snacks are easier to create than ever before with Reduct.Video. The next time you see the eyes of your stakeholders glaze over, remember it doesn’t have to be like this. Give a research snack a try—you might just want another!
