How to share your UX research

Tips for making reports your colleagues will actually read

School has taught us to measure a report’s value by its length. We’re all familiar with word counts, and padding out our sentences to hit that arbitrary target. Or bumping up the font size to increase the page count.

As adults, we know that writing this way is silly. We make things as short or as long as they need to be to say what we need to say. From emails to wiki pages, we’re all used to writing long-form content in our workplaces. For UX researchers, reports are a big part of our toolkit.

Why do user researchers write reports?

After we go through a phase of research, we need a way to share the findings with our team. Since we collect so much helpful data in one test, a research report is a nice way for us to share results in full detail.

There are a few reasons for this:

• The results can be used to guide future product decisions, and build things that customers will find helpful
• It gives your team an opportunity to empathise with their customers
• Over time, they’ll prove the value of getting early feedback from customers