3 approaches to sharing video to increase the impact of your research, and how they work differently
February 2022
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4 min read
At Reduct, we've seen more and more researchers leverage the power of video in their day-to-day work. Excitingly, researchers have come up with diverse practices of how and when they use and share videos. In this article, we're going to talk about three different approaches for sharing out video, designed to engage and influence your stakeholders.
Research Snacks: Video snippets to boost relatability
Research reports and big readout presentations are great, but they require a lot of time and attention from recipients, which limits how often they are appropriate - especially when your company is looking to move fast. As a researcher, you want to be able to share insights with stakeholders in a timely and consumable way.
"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."
- Rannie Teodoro, Head of Design & Research, Thumbtack
"Research snacks" are meant to be a kind of stand-alone "nugget" stemming from research. For instance, a really good quote you just heard from a user interview or an observation you can share immediately after a day of interviews. This kind of video clip is bite-size and usually just a minute or two in length, but interesting enough to spark conversations among your audience.
Using Reduct, the Thumbtack team is able to regularly share research snacks over 5-10 different Slack channels, tagging relevant stakeholders in the process. Research snacks capture attention from engineers, and often spark larger conversations within their company—all from a single short video.
As another example, Mira Rao, ex-Director of Research at BlinkUX, use research snacks for research PR:
Mira created a dedicated Slack channel literally called "Research Snacks"; Every day she'd post a clip to share with the entire company. Repeatedly sharing insightful, bite-size videos helps Mira receive real-time reactions from cross-functional teams, and understand how much people are influenced by her work. Sharing insights continuously also creates opportunities to demonstrate the value of research.
Using Reduct, extracting a clip from a recording is just as easy as selecting text; cutting text also cuts the video; a clip can be shared as a unique URL to multiple platforms.
Killer Video: When you have to overturn a belief or hypothesis
As qualitative researchers, you spend a lot of time with users and/or customers, understand them deeply, and really value their perspectives. That may not always be true for the rest of an organization (or for your clients if you work in an agency) — especially those who don't have an opportunity to interact with customers as a part of their jobs. When you're the person who hears user pain points first-hand, and points out the problems of your product or service, the hard truth is that influencing others and changing other people's perspectives can be a tough job. That's why a "Killer Video" can help you drive your points home.
A Killer Video is when you take 5, 10, maybe even 15 different users who are all saying the same thing.
As Jim Tincher, a journey mapping expert, described when he brought a killer video to his client: "I was once described as being subtle as a sledgehammer. So this may be an example of that, where we'll just overwhelm [the client] with videos so they can't deny it."
In qualitative research, particularly in otherwise quantitatively minded organizations, the burden of proof can be really high. When you present videos that aggregate multiple perspectives together, you achieve more than telling a powerful story with authentic emotions, and pre-empting the perspective that "it's just one person".
Watch a killer video of researchers talking about the power of killer video 😉
You must wonder: Killer video sounds great, but hunting through hours of interviews to find what I need sounds…urgh! Don't worry - Reduct's search feature allows you to easily find the perfect moments to make your point across recordings or even projects, and allows you to quickly compile them into a reel.
Watch Party: The best insights are the ones that stick
Research Snacks (shared over Slack), and Killer Videos (embedded in a presentation) are great ways to share research video. You can even go further, to design experiences where stakeholders not only watch video, but also reflect, and contribute their own learnings & observations. ie, Have a Research "Watch Party!"
Joanna Vodopivec and Guy Viner, Principal Design Researchers at Intuit, created and host regular watch parties called "Tacos & Taxes", where cross-functional teams are invited to watch ~10 min customer videos, then have group discussions on any observations and learnings. When these watch parties are organized regularly, the impact of sharing relevant and emerging customer themes increases. Different teams gain a shared understanding of actual product experience and that, in turn, leads to a collective bias for action.
Watch a 3min video of how Tacos & Taxes is designed and implemented.
Having ready-to-share research highlight reels allows research teams to extend a culture of customer obsession.
In Intuit's case, the consumers of their research highlight reels ranging from the immediate teams the researchers work with, to over 1,000 employees when the reels are shown in product reviews and company all-hands. Having ready-to-share research highlight reels allows research teams to extend a culture of customer obsession.
With Reduct, all your findings and insights can be tagged and organized in an online repository where your team can easily access to research videos. When you need to kick off a watch party, preparing for those highlight reels is simple and fast.
Reduct delivers the power of video with the simplicity of text
"Reduct has changed the way we've done research. Video is like the mainstay of how we communicate our findings to our stakeholders."
– Sarah Kettles, Senior Director of Research, the Zebra
Research snacks, killer videos, and watch parties - these creative research share-out approaches were not available or easy to implement at scale until editing research video became fast, simple and collaborative by using Reduct.
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