What Makes a Good Research Insight Great?

2. A Great Insight Is Simple in Language and Concept

A research insight that is devoid of cryptic, academic language and uses a casual tone and straightforward words is more effective. Presenting insights that attempt to boil the ocean by encompassing every single observation is like flogging your stakeholders over the head with a big sledgehammer and leaves them confused, headachy, and looking for a quick escape—a guaranteed prescription for insight amnesia.

Communicating multiple concepts in a single insight will confuse stakeholders and reduce the effectiveness of the insight. Stating individual insights that stand on their own is much more effective. One study that I conducted of how managers receive notifications indicated that they prefer to know what is coming up in their schedules rather than view their past schedules. They receive notifications via various methods, including email, text alerts, and face-to-face interactions with their employees. Each of these concepts has useful design implications. However, putting them together would reduce their impact on the product direction.

An overloaded insight might be: Managers prefer to know what is coming up so they can plan for the future and prefer to receive their notifications about events through email, text alerts, and face-to-face communications with employees. Because this insight communicates more than one key idea, there is a good chance that half of your stakeholders will remember just the first part of the insight, while the other half remembers just the second part. Thus, the insight has only half the impact that two separate insights would have had. Express key concepts as independent insights—especially if each of them has significant design implications.

3. A Great Insight Is Meaningful and Memorable

Using catchy phrases to express your insights can help improve recall among stakeholders when they are trying to validate or refute their ideas.

One study I conducted involved looking at how employees feel about approvals—for example, getting a manager to approve time off work or a company purchase. In this study, the insight I uncovered was that, under certain circumstances—especially those where risk is very low and there is great trust between an employee and a manager—employees never really need to get their manager’s explicit approval. Instead, they might send an Outlook invitation with their name and the subject line Vacation, for example. Even if their manager did not respond, they assumed their request was approved. Instead of stating this insight including all of these details, making it less likely that stakeholders would remember it, I summed up the insight in ten words or less: When it comes to approvals, silence implies consent. This statement was short, catchy, and something stakeholders could remember.

Storytelling is an ancient tool that human beings use to help bring meaning and purpose to their worlds. In user research, insights are really excerpts from a larger story about users. According to Donna Lichaw, author of The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love, stories go beyond using your sense of vision or hearing, they are about being. An insight that tells a story is the ultimate empathy builder. When stakeholders hear a compelling story, it is as if they are experiencing the pain or joy of the protagonist. Ensuring your insights tell a story will make them more meaningful and memorable to your stakeholders—especially for those who tend to suffer from bouts of insight amnesia. Such stories should help to reinforce the insights product teams need to remember as they think about the user experience of their product.

4. A Great Insight Speaks to Your Audience

A poetry instructor once told me that you’ll know a poem is special when it takes the top of your head off. Such a poem surprises and moves people at the same time. The most effective insights are those that move people in a certain way. They come from answering stakeholders’ burning questions that help shape your core research goals. They motivate stakeholders to take specific actions or change a product team’s mindset about a topic of concern. When an insight is compelling, stakeholders may sometimes even quote your research verbatim.

When stakeholders start quoting your research insights, you’ll know that something has stuck with them. After a recent study to help my team understand how human-resource professionals conduct exit interviews, one of the UX designers came up to me and started talking about one of the key findings from my research. He cited the key finding verbatim, which allowed him to imagine the implications of this insight for his effort to build an optimal experience for exit interviews. The fact that he recalled this information exactly as I wrote it was a testament to the insight's effectiveness. The insight affected him in such a way that he was able to recognize the right implications from the insight right away.

5. A Great Insight Inspires Clear, Direct Action

Insights from research should be actionable for UX designers and product teams. Recently, when iteratively testing a prototype that implemented the setup of a software product for employees’ use, it became very clear that the changes we had made to the prototype during the first iteration were not effective. Using the first iteration of the design, participants had to complete two steps on one screen. One insight from the first round of testing was that participants had failed to notice the second step and, thus, tried to proceed without completing it.

The design recommendation that resulted from this insight was to make the second step more salient, so users would notice it prior to attempting to proceed to the next page. So the designer decided to add a constraint to the page, disabling the Next button until the user had completed the first step. But the insight we gleaned during the second round of testing was that participants were still ignoring the second step and actually tried to click the disabled Next button. While this insight warranted a similar recommendation to make the second step more salient, it also communicated a clear, direct action that allowed the designer to change his approach to fulfilling this recommendation: he moved the second step its own separate page, so it no longer competed for attention with the first step. This insight yielded a clear, direct action that the designer could take, allowing him to iterate until the design achieved its objective.

6. A Great Insight Reinforces Ownership and Commitment

How can user researchers communicate their insights to UX designers and other stakeholders in such a way that they are willing to commit to and follow through on the agreed-on recommendations? The key ingredients of great insights are ownership and commitment. Stakeholders can own insights that generate actionable recommendations, increasing the likelihood that they’ll follow through with solutions. Two psychological principles underlie these two ingredients: the endowment effect and commitment and consistency.

The endowment effect describes the way people tend to place greater value on the things they own than those they don’t own. This effect applies to research insights. The ownership of insights can begin during the research-planning stage. When stakeholders create hypotheses in preparation for a research study, associate each hypothesis with a particular stakeholder. This ownership information should be part of the study guide as long as it remains relevant. When stakeholders feel that they own an idea—or, in this case, a hypothesis—they are more likely to honor their commitment to follow through on any actions their idea generated.

Furthermore, stakeholders will be consistent in their desire to commit to and own an idea, regardless of whether their hypothesis is correct! This is the principle of commitment and consistency. When great research insights either validate or refute a hypothesis, recognize the stakeholder who originated the hypothesis. This recognition gives the stakeholder points for participation, as well as acknowledgment that their idea worked or could use improvement —or perhaps that it inspired additional ideas for new design directions.

Conclusion

Of course, not all insights from user research will meet all six of these criteria. Although research insights won’t necessarily take the top of your head off or be expressed as catchy phrases or meaningful stories, they should always inspire action on the part of your product team or other stakeholders. The goal for research insights may be to make a better product, improve its user experience, or simply change team members’ mindsets by quashing biases and false assumptions about users.