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A complete guide to presenting UX research findings

In this complete guide to presenting UX research findings, we’ll cover what you should include in a UX research report, how to present UX research findings and tips for presenting your UX research.

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presenting UX research findings

User experience research sets out to identify the problem that a product or service needs to solve and finds a way to do just that. Research is the first and most important step to optimising user experience.

UX researchers do this through interviews, surveys, focus groups, data analysis and reports. Reports are how UX researchers present their work to other stakeholders in a company, such as designers, developers and executives.

In this guide, we’ll cover what you should include in a UX research report, how to present UX research findings and tips for presenting your UX research.

Components of a UX research report

How to write a ux research report, 5 tips on presenting ux research findings.

Ready to present your research findings? Let’s dive in.

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There are six key components to a UX research report.

Introduction

The introduction should give an overview of your UX research . Then, relate any company goals or pain points to your research. Lastly, your introduction should briefly touch on how your research could affect the business.

Research goals

Simply put, your next slide or paragraph should outline the top decisions you need to make, the search questions you used, as well as your hypothesis and expectations.

Business value

In this section, you can tell your stakeholders why your research matters. If you base this research on team-level or product development goals, briefly touch on those.

Methodology

Share the research methods you used and why you chose those methods. Keep it concise and tailored to your audience. Your stakeholders probably don’t need to hear everything that went into your process.

Key learnings

This section will be the most substantial part of your report or presentation. Present your findings clearly and concisely. Share as much context as possible while keeping your target audience – your stakeholders – in mind.

Recommendations

In the last section of your report, make actionable recommendations for your stakeholders. Share possible solutions or answers to your research questions. Make your suggestions clear and consider any future research studies that you think would be helpful.

1. Define your audience

Most likely, you’ll already have conducted stakeholder interviews when you were planning your research. Taking those interviews into account, you should be able to glean what they’re expecting from your presentation.

Tailor your presentation to the types of findings that are most relevant, how those findings might affect their work and how they prefer to receive information. Only include information they will care about the most in a medium that’s easy for them to understand.

Do they have a technical understanding of what you’re doing or should you keep it a non-technical presentation? Make sure you keep the terminology and data on a level they can understand.

What part of the business do they work in? Executives will want to know about how it affects their business, while developers will want to know what technological changes they need to make.

2. Summarise

As briefly as possible, summarise your research goals, business value and methodology. You don’t need to go into too much detail for any of these items. Simply share the what, why and how of your research.

Answer these questions:

  • What research questions did you use, and what was your hypothesis?
  • What business decision will your research assist with?
  • What methodology did you use?

You can briefly explain your methods to recruit participants, conduct interviews and analyse results. If you’d like more depth, link to interview plans, surveys, prototypes, etc.

3. Show key learnings

Your stakeholders will probably be pressed for time. They won’t be able to process raw data and they usually don’t want to see all of the work you’ve done. What they’re looking for are key insights that matter the most to them specifically. This is why it’s important to know your audience.

Summarise a few key points at the beginning of your report. The first thing they want to see are atomic research nuggets. Create condensed, high-priority bullet points that get immediate attention. This allows people to reference it quickly. Then, share relevant data or artefacts to illustrate your key learnings further.

Relevant data:

  • Recurring trends and themes
  • Relevant quotes that illustrate important findings
  • Data visualisations

Relevant aspects of artefacts:

  • Quotes from interviews
  • User journey maps
  • Affinity diagrams
  • Storyboards

For most people you’ll present to, a summary of key insights will be enough. But, you can link to a searchable repository where they can dig deeper. You can include artefacts and tagged data for them to reference.

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4. Share insights and recommendations

Offer actionable recommendations, not opinions. Share clear next steps that solve pain points or answer pending decisions. If you have any in mind, suggest future research options too. If users made specific recommendations, share direct quotes.

5. Choose a format

There are two ways you could share your findings in a presentation or a report. Let’s look at these two categories and see which might be the best fit for you.

Usually, a presentation is best for sharing data with a large group and when presenting to non-technical stakeholders. Presentations should be used for visual communication and when you only need to include relevant information in a brief summary.

A presentation is usually formatted in a:

  • Case studies
  • Atomic research nuggets
  • Pre-recorded video

If you’re presenting to a smaller group, technical stakeholder or other researchers, you might want to use a report. This gives you the capacity to create a comprehensive record. Further, reports could be categorised based on their purpose as usability, analytics or market research reports.

A report is typically formatted in a:

  • Notion or Confluence page
  • Slack update

You might choose to write a report first, then create a presentation. After the presentation, you can share a more in-depth report. The report could also be used for records later.

1. Keep it engaging

When you’re presenting your findings, find ways to engage those you’re presenting to. You can ask them questions about their assumptions or what you’re presenting to get them more involved.

For example, “What do you predict were our findings when we asked users to test the usability of the menu?” or “What suggestions do you think users had for [a design problem]?”

If you don’t want to engage them with questions, try including alternative formats like videos, audio clips, visualisations or high-fidelity prototypes. Anything that’s interactive or different will help keep their engagement. They might engage with these items during or after your presentation.

Another way to keep it engaging is to tell a story throughout your presentation. Some UX researchers structure their presentations in the form of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey . Start in the middle with your research findings and then zoom out to your summary, insights and recommendations.

2. Combine qualitative and quantitative data

When possible, use qualitative data to back up quantitative data. For example, include a visualisation of poll results with a direct quote about that pain point.

Use this opportunity to show the value of the work you do and build empathy for your users. Translate your findings into a format that your stakeholders – designers, developers or executives – will be able to understand and act upon.

3. Make it actionable

Actionable presentations are engaging and they should have some business value . That means they need to solve a problem or at least move toward a solution to a problem. They might intend to optimise usability, find out more about the market or analyse user data.

Here are a few ways to make it actionable:

  • Include a to-do list at the end
  • Share your deck and repository files for future reference
  • Recommend solutions for product or business decisions
  • Suggest what kind of research should happen next (if any)
  • Share answers to posed research questions

4. Keep it concise and effective

Make it easy for stakeholders to dive deeper if they want to but make it optional. Yes, this means including links to an easily searchable repository and keeping your report brief.

Humans tend to focus best on just 3-4 things at a time. So, limit your report to three or four major insights. Additionally, try to keep your presentation down to 20-30 minutes.

Remember, you don’t need to share everything you learned. In your presentation, you just need to show your stakeholders what they are looking for. Anything else can be sent later in your repository or a more detailed PDF report.

5. Admit the shortcomings of UX research

If you get pushback from stakeholders during your presentation, it’s okay to share your constraints.

Your stakeholders might not understand that your sample size is big enough or how you chose the users in your study or why you did something the way you did. While qualitative research might not be statistically significant, it’s usually representative of your larger audience and it’s okay to point that out.

Because they aren’t researchers, it’s your job to explain your methodology to them but also be upfront about the limitations UX research can pose. When all of your cards are on the table, stakeholders are more likely to trust you.

When it comes to presenting your UX research findings, keep it brief and engaging. Provide depth with external resources after your presentation. This is how you get stakeholders to find empathy for your users. This is how you master the art of UX.

Need to go back to the basics and learn more about UX research? Dive into these articles:

What is UX research? The 9 best UX research tools to use in 2022

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How to Present UX Research and Turn Insight to Action

UX research presentation

Most companies know the importance of UX research in building sustainable and user-friendly products that meet the needs of their audience.  

However, conducting the research is one-half of the equation. Presenting UX research in a way that compels stakeholders to take action is the second half.

Without adequate reporting, research is just a pile of data. Reporting, by way of presentation, makes your data actionable. By adopting effective UX presentation techniques such as storytelling, visualization, and slides, you ensure that your research influences the development process instead of ending up in storage without being used.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

  • What is a UX research presentation
  • Why UX presentations are important 
  • The challenges of presenting UX research
  • 9 Tips to Improve Your Research Presentations

What Is UX Research Presentation? 

A UX research presentation is sharing insights from your user research findings with stakeholders. You make recommendations for product improvement and capture decisions from research methodologies and testing phases. 

UX research presentations require you to condense your research notes , insights, and recommendations into 8-10 captivating slides that justify the research and compel stakeholders to take action. Sharing your research findings can help the design and product teams to:

  • Make design decision
  • Refine existing user needs
  • Prioritize their workflow
  • Develop a product roadmap based on your recommendations
  • Write new user stories
  • Improve usability of your product

Why Is UX Presentation Important?

Importance of UX research presentation

Make Sense of Your Research Findings

Research presentations are an opportunity to share your findings in an easy way for stakeholders to understand. A good presentation fulfills the following:

  • Describes the goal of the research and gives context about what happened during the UX research process . For example, you may have made some assumptions about your target audience, encountered bias, or failed to include a user group during the planning phase
  • Explain the why behind each research outcome that rationalizes why research participants liked or didn’t like a feature of your product
  • Inform decision making for the product team to help them prioritize resources during development

Quickly Relay Findings

Sharing research findings ensures that nothing slips through the cracks and decisions are relayed quickly with the team. In this scenario, a presentation is not a 60-page document. Instead, it’s a UX research nugget made up of high-priority action items that require immediate attention.

Capture Insights and Make Informed Recommendations 

The most essential element of a good UX presentation is sharing the right insights and making recommendations that lead to a successful product launch. Research repository tools like Aurelius allow you to analyze large batches of raw research data faster. This way, it’s easy to draw insight and make recommendations that lead to product success.

Document Your Process for Future Use

You can document processes that didn’t work as insights and explain the why behind methods that worked. It ensures that you don’t repeat the mistake in the future. In addition, your team can use your presentation as a reference to make smarter design decisions and as a background for product update research.

Improve Your UX Research Process

You can’t move forward if you don’t learn from the past. A UX research presentation is an opportunity for the product team and stakeholders to reflect on the decisions made during the product development. It’s hindsight that ensures designers will avoid patterns that underperform or overperform in testing. 

What Are the Challenges of Presenting UX Research?

Lack of trust in qualitative data .

This mostly happens with stakeholders who have a background in data science. They do not trust results from qualitative research because they say that findings are not statistically significant and do not hold any value. For example, you’ve interviewed 20 people as part of your research, but your audience is squirming because they think that’s a small sample size.

One way to get past this constraint is to be upfront about limitations in your UX research. Skeptics are more likely to trust you when you admit to the shortcomings of qualitative research.

Another way is to explain that qualitative research may not be statistically significant, but it is often statistically representative of your larger audience.

Keeping Bias Out of the Results

It’s not enough to be aware of your bias as a researcher. It’s also important not to fuel bias among your audience. 

Be careful how you draw insights from research. Share the research findings, tell the audience what the study doesn’t show, and advise how to use the results to make changes. 

Remind your audience that the objective of UX research is to collect information, not create absolute truth. So, you form a hypothesis and try to prove it, but it’s not perfect as some may wrongly assume.

Properly Conveying the Participant’s Perspective to Stakeholders 

Empathy is a huge part of conducting research. It’s understanding the frustrations and emotions of research participants and conveying these unique viewpoints in a way that your audience understands. 

Using visuals such as video or audio recordings during your presentation is a great way to communicate emotion in a genuine and unfiltered way. 

Inspiring Action

Perhaps the biggest challenge for UX researchers is turning research insight into action. You’ve collected feedback through multiple UX research methods , made recommendations, and given an excellent presentation. But it’s all meaningless if stakeholders don’t take action.

Apart from the reasons we’ve mentioned above, such as distrust in research data and lack of understanding, scientists found that personal trust between audience and researcher plays a role in convincing stakeholders to take action. 

Trust-building is a crucial skill for every researcher. It’s easier to drive action when you have a relationship with stakeholders. 

How to Create Better UX Research Presentations

1. know your audience.

how to make ux research presentations

You’re better able to capture and retain audience attention when you speak directly to their interests. One of the biggest mistakes first-time researchers make when presenting research is not reading the room and just going through your slides. It’s impossible to make an emotional connection with an audience you don’t know.

When you know your audience, you can tell a story that immediately connects you to your audience and sets the tone for the rest of your presentation. You can also tailor your deliverables and recommendations to the interest and needs of your audience. 

For example, if you’re speaking to C-level executives, you’ll discuss how the research findings could increase conversion rate, revenue, and customer retention. For the product team , you’d focus on how research could improve user experience and remove obstacles that customers previously faced. 

2. Opt for Quick Findings Over Detailed Reports 

One of the debates for teams when presenting UX research is choosing whether to share a full report or quick findings.

A detailed report is long-form. It gives you the freedom and space to describe your findings in detail and make comprehensive recommendations. It usually ends up being 30-40 pages long.

In reality, a CEO or C-suite executive on the move won’t have time to sit through a 30-slide presentation. Instead, they want something quick, efficient, and concise. You can achieve this goal through UX research nuggets .

Making your research presentation efficient forces you to eliminate fluff and stick to the most essential information to help stakeholders take action.

Include the original goal of the research and 4-6 key insights. Then, attach recommendations and next steps to key i nsights.

3. Embrace Storytelling

Stories are the fastest way to connect with a cold audience. According to researcher Paul Zak , stories cause the brain to produce oxytocin, a feel-good chemical related to empathy and a desire to cooperate. 

In another research, Princeton University Neuroscientist Uri Hasson researched the effect of storytelling on the brain . He found that listeners’ brain activity synced on a deep level with the storyteller’s brain activity when telling a story. Intentional stories that have a tie-in with the research topic move the audience to take action.

A few tips to guide you when using storytelling during presentations include:

  • Tell a story your audience can relate to
  • Use details to transport the reader to the scene so they can experience it
  • Make it personal
  • Ensure the story relates to the research topic

4. Use an Inverted Pyramid

how to present UX research

With the inverted pyramid, your most important information sits at the top. The first section of your presentation contains:

  • What is the problem I want to solve?
  • Who am I speaking to? (teammates, manager, decision-makers, engineers)
  • Why am I speaking? (What is the desired action you want the audience to take)

Use a high-level overview slide to cover the first section. Your audience is more likely to sit through your entire presentation if they understand the value at a glance.

The second section is the body covering the argument, controversy, evidence, and supporting visuals. The final part is the tail that summarizes the presentation and includes any additional information.

5. Simplify Data with Visualization 

Vision is our primary sense for understanding the world around us. The human brain processes and retains visuals faster than text. Your presentation should have more visuals than text. Always remember the golden rule – show, not tell.

Large blocks of text are boring. Visual aids such as infographics, videos, screenshots, gifs, and charts break up text and engage your audience. Where text can quickly become complicated, visuals clarify information and make information easier to digest and remember.

A few visualization tips to remember:

  • Use consistent fonts, colors, and icons when designing your presentation
  • Use graphs and charts to present data
  • Do not add multiple graphics in one slide. One message per visual
  • Use the right graph type to communicate clearly
  • Edit ruthlessly
  • Use muted colors

6. Keep it Short

The human mind can only store 3-4 things at once. So, focus your research outcomes on three to four key insights and recommendations you want your audience to take away.

Keep your presentation within 20 minutes. I know it’s hard, but you shouldn’t share everything you learned in the study during the presentation, or you’ll overwhelm your audience. 

Share high-level information during the presentation and send the research report as a PDF or email so everyone can look further into the research. In addition, you can use Aurelius to share a live link of an automatically generated report with your audience.

7. Use Slides During Presentations

Split your slides presentation into three sections:

  • What we did – discuss your research process
  • The finding slides – Key Insight slides
  • What to do next – Recommendation slides

Each slide should have a heading that summarizes an important finding and explains the impact with visuals. Use quotes taken from research participants to support key insight.

When using video clips, you don’t have to share the entire recording. Instead, trim it down to the key scenes or combine several sequences about the same key insight into a 30 seconds reel.

use slides during presentation

Ensure you’re using images taken during the research process (ethnography, observation, usability testing sessions) to show participants in action with the product. Again, it’s more likely to elicit an emotional response than using generic images.

Focus each key insight slide on the user. It should distill their personality, behavior, needs, use of your product, and what happened during user testing. Then, prioritize the most critical information into five slides.

8. Give Recommendations and Next Steps

Your UX research presentation should include recommendations based on key research insight. For every problem, have a recommendation. Then, tell your audience how the research should be incorporated in design or product updates .

Also, don’t forget to demonstrate the value of your research. Show your audience how the recommendations will support your company’s goals and impact the product roadmap.

9. Ask Listeners to Save Questions Until After the Presentation 

save questions for later during presentations

You can either allow your audience to ask questions during or after the presentation. Asking questions during the presentation will enable you to clear any confusion on the spot and carry everyone along. 

However, it’s distracting each time you’re interrupted during the presentation. You’ll also risk losing the audience if the question isn’t relevant to the specific section you’re talking about.

The second approach is better. You ask your audience to save questions until the end of the presentation. This method ensures that you maintain a great flow throughout the presentation and answer all questions at once.

10. Share Your Research

Your UX presentation only contains high-level recommendations you want your audience to implement. However, you still have great insight that provides context, and you couldn’t share those during the presentation due to time constraints. 

You can create a more enriched report in Aurelius and share it with key stakeholders after the presentation to make it stick.

However, sending emails, PDFs, or a link isn’t enough. People are busy. Emails get buried, and attention span is low. 

If you want your research to be implemented, send follow-up emails and reach out personally to the executives. Share the report in your company’s internal knowledge base with a relevant title and tags, so it’s easy to find. 

If you have a departmental or company Slack, share it there, so they see the presentation in multiple places. In addition, you can integrate Slack and Jira with Aurelius to share your findings with other teams.

Focus on Showing Value That Stakeholders Want to See

Congratulations! You’ve created a value-driven UX research presentation. But it’s not ready yet. Read through your slides again. Does your presentation reflect the goals you promised stakeholders when you set out on the research journey? Have you demonstrated value in a way that even non-UX audience members would understand?  

These are questions to answer as you wrap up your UX presentation slides. Be ruthless when trimming the fat from your presentation. Just because your discovery is exciting to you doesn’t necessarily mean it’s valuable to stakeholders. 

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What is UX Research: The Ultimate Guide for UX Researchers

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How to write and present actionable UX research reports

Regardless of how thorough or valuable your user research is, it quickly becomes meaningless if you’re unable to succinctly put it together and present it in a digestible UX research report.

UX research reporting is a skill just as valuable as being able to conduct the research in the first place. It lets you showcase methodology and findings of your research, and ensure a product’s user experience delivers with the first iteration.

Luckily, how to write and present UX research reports is something you can learn. What’s more, this chapter will guide you through it (and provide free templates for your UX report).

What is a UX research report?

A user research report is an easy-to-digest summary of a user research project that aims to update product stakeholders on results, inform product decisions with user data, and harmoniously guide a product build or iteration.

Once upon a time, UX research reporting was a cumbersome, dreaded box to tick. It was notorious for resulting in unnavigable reports that product teams would rather leave at the bottom of their inbox than try to consume.

The word 'report' conjures images of lengthy word documents, a PDF one-pager, or hour-long presentation with an occasional GIF—but a research report doesn't have to mean that.

Kevin Rapley , Senior User Researcher at Justice Digital, explains a UX report as being “about arming our teammates with data that allows them to decide on the direction of a product or service.”

A useful UX report includes:

  • The research goals and research process
  • Research questions the report is hoping to answer
  • A recap of the UX research plan
  • What UX research methods were used and why
  • Quantitative and qualitative data sets and conclusions
  • Key insights & actionable takeaways
  • An expanded data appendix

Why do you need a user research report?

Product teams need a user research report to reflect on research activities and accurately guide a product’s scope with key insights. A UX research report helps sort information, defend research, and affirm (or disprove) a hypothesis. No matter how well-organized your research repository is, sometimes simply having the research results available is not enough. A succinct report will align entire teams in one sitting by presenting findings in a unique way.

In short, a research report helps to:

  • Positively influence UX design
  • Make sense of data sets and explain complicated graphs or other quantitative research results
  • Provide actionable recommendations on next steps
  • Summarize key findings, so they can be translated into every role and responsibility of the product team

Where UX research enables product teams to understand the user, prove or disprove hypotheses, and prioritize and generate ideas, a UX research report ensures the user is at the center of every product decision. Presenting that UX report then aligns team members on goals and priorities, and provides authentic user insights to inform every product decision.

We’ve covered what a research report is , but what is it not ? A UX research report is not a static, one-time document that your team reads once. It’s an ongoing reference point; the guardrails and guiding insights that guarantees the entire build stays on track.

How to write an effective UX research report: the essential elements

No matter how you choose to present your research study, there are a few elements that every report needs to include for it to be both useful and effective. Let’s look at how to create a report.

Introduction

Your introduction should lay out your research goals, plan, and scope. It should cover your product team’s pain points, and give a clear study overview. You need to answer what you did and why. The introduction can go on to include sales support data and competitive product analysis that inspired or guided this research project.

It’s a good idea to set up how this research helps to support and answer related company goals, team-level goals, and product-dev goals: so all stakeholders know it’s got something for them.

You can include questions from your UX research strategy you had originally hoped to answer, even if your results have gone on to answer other questions as well. Now’s also a good time to introduce research stakeholders: your fellow research team members.

As a secondary step to your introduction, ensure you’re including the approach you took to your UX research process : i.e. what research methods you used, as well as participant profiles and your user personas .

Don’t feel you need to spend too much time on this, says Charlie Herbozo Vidal , Senior User Experience Researcher at CVS Health. “As researchers, it’s not uncommon to dwell on the methodology for longer than needed. While interrogating methods might be valuable to other researchers, business partners might be disengaged by them.”

Ultimately, while methodology is important, it’s the results that most people are here for.

Key findings

This is where you get people on the edge of their seats! Give an overview of your findings, before breaking them down into more detail. Remind your audience ‘what we thought’ vs. what you actually learned.

Artifacts to use are:

  • User personas built
  • Insights from customer interviews
  • User journey maps
  • Prototype testing
  • Storyboards
  • Feedback & satisfaction reports

At the end of this section, and continuing throughout your presentation, you can pepper relevant atomic research nuggets.

Make sure you champion the user's needs throughout, and make special notes of 'offhand' comments users make. Often, it's the random comments that provide the most insight—they must not be forgotten about when writing the report.

Jack Dyer , Designer at Interactive Schools

Summarize your quantitative and qualitative research , and how they’ll both impact your product design and growth. Lay out opportunities versus risks, good-to-knows versus must-knows. Here you’ll want to convey the impact of each suggested step, roadmap designs, and figure out the long and short-term project scope. A few things to cover in your next steps are:

  • Long and short-term goals
  • ICE framework (Impact, confidence, ease)
  • Roles and responsibilities for each task
  • A timeline of events and project map
  • A request for resources
  • Desired outcomes

No matter how you’re presenting your research, be it asynchronously or not, you’ll need to include a Q&A. These can be subjective (based on what you think your team is likely to ask), pre-collected ahead of the presentation, answered live, or an opportunity to build an FAQ later.

What’s important is to acknowledge and be open to receiving questions. After all, questions are a positive thing—it means people are actually listening!

It’s easy to overlook the appendix after putting together a detailed report, but all that glorious research data needs to be accounted for and referenced clearly. Plus, you never know to what extent your team will want to dive into it. Your appendix is also where you’ll want to include secondary research that didn’t make the cut but backs up your research.

9 Ways to present UX research findings

UX research reporting will look a little different depending on your internal personas and organizational culture. First, ask yourself: who is your audience? Who needs to see the report, and who will benefit from seeing it? This will help determine how to present your user research report.

A few things to consider:

  • Are you working with internal or external stakeholders? Tool limitation and file-sharing will differ for both.
  • Are you working with an in-office, fully-remote, or hybrid team?
  • Are you sitting in the same time zone or not?
  • What are the knowledge levels like within your team?
  • How does your team communicate daily/weekly/monthly?
  • Are there any predetermined knowledge bases or tools your team is comfortable with?

The most common players across a UX team that need to understand your UX research report are:

  • Product Designers (UX/UI)
  • Fellow Product Researchers
  • UX/UI Writers

However , it doesn’t stop at your product decision-making team. More often than not, there will be other stakeholders that can benefit from your research presentation. Your marketing, finance, sales, and even C-suite executives will massively benefit from your findings too. If you can tailor versions of your report or provide key summaries for each collective, even better!

Psst 👉 This is much easier to do when you have a research team that can host stakeholder interviews ahead of your research process.

Now, let’s get into the report formats to consider:

1. Workshops: for real-time, collaborative reports

user research presentation

First up, workshops. Workshops are a unique way of keeping your report interactive and engaging. They can be held remotely or in-person, but are almost impossible to hold asynchronously—so time zones are a big factor here.

You’ll also want to consider workshopping tools if you’re hosting digitally—a few to consider are: Miro, Mural, FigJam, and Gather.

A plus with workshops is that your stakeholders will actively have a say early on in the product development process , allowing you to foster more diverse inputs, minimize research bias you may have accumulated in your summaries, and build a sense of responsibility for the product’s success early on.

A negative of workshops is that they can be culprits to in-the-room or bandwagon bias. People are quick to ride on the coattails of a strong conclusion, without fully understanding or trialing another (less popular) conclusion or suggestion.

2. Slack channels: for an asynchronous and interactive research repository

Slack is a great option (especially if you’re already using it) if your research team needs to deliver insights to a fully-distributed collection of stakeholders. Slack tends to be the go-to channel for startups and creative companies, and there’s some key features you can tap into:

  • Canvas: Store files, images, videos, and more in one place
  • Huddles: Jump on a quick chat to fill in any gaps
  • Clips: Post audio, video, or screen-sharing clips
  • Connect: Team up with freelancers and agencies working on the project with you
  • Workflow: Build drag-and-drop processes from your findings
  • Knowledge sharing: Tag your data accordingly so it's easy to find later

3. Knowledge bases: for self-serve UX research reports

Knowledge bases can be a great home for your research presentation, and work especially well for distributed teams working across different time zones.

However your team is set up, research repositories are incredibly valuable. Sharing your report in a centralized location, regardless of the other ways you distribute findings, can democratize research , showcase the impact of your work, and disseminate valuable insights throughout your entire organization.

Keep in mind that knowledge bases can be tough to navigate if poorly organized or tagged. If you’re storing your UX research report in a knowledge base, ensure you provide clear instructions on how someone can find it, and how to navigate through the report itself.

If you have the time, run a card sorting test with an internal focus group to see how you can logically sort your research for those who are going to be looking for it.

4. Presentations / slide decks: great for the PAS framework

user research presentation

Live presentations tend to be the most impactful, but do risk being short-lived if you don’t have a follow-up plan for after your presentation.

While they’re great for sharing metrics and visuals, and can provide a beautiful overview of your research project, presentations can be a little one-sided. This one-way presentation style can prevent collaboration and innovation from the rest of the team. Consider how you can make your presentation interactive or engaging, whether it’s taking questions throughout or doing a ‘choose your own adventure’ session and asking people which sections they want to review first.

Kevin Rapley , Senior User Researcher at Justice Digital, recommends presenting slides using the PAS framework:

  • Problem: State the problem you set out to overcome
  • Agitate: Detail the impact or opportunity missed by not meeting the problem
  • Solution: Offer a route forward from the research findings and insights, the next steps, and likely outcomes by solving the problem

Kevin explains that the PAS framework cuts to the detail people are invested in: “Stakeholders want to know the path forward: Are we on the right track to build this service? Have we uncovered user engagement or uptake issues? Have we learned that our assumptions are incorrect and we now have a better understanding of user needs? Presenting slides in this way delivers what’s needed.”

5. Written reports: for direct and simple sharing

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. A written report is probably the idea that jumped to the front of your mind when you read the title of this chapter. For many, this may seem like the ‘OG’ of UX reports.

These types of reports often come as a PDF or a word document, making them static, reluctant to change, and resulting in low engagement or re-reads. Delivering a written report via email also means you can’t guarantee your audience is going to read it. On the other hand, written reports can be incredibly detailed, scanable for different stakeholders, and include all kinds of results from visual data to qualitative findings.

For many teams this method still works, especially if you’re trying to communicate findings to a distributed, asynchronous team. Written UX reports enable people to go through things in their own time—and come back to it when they need to.

6. Atomic research nuggets: to eliminate ‘bad research memory’

Deriving from an atom—the smallest unit of matter—atomic UX research nuggets are minute and succinct conclusions from data points. They’re always aligned and tagged with a product direction. Formalized by Tomer Sharon and Daniel Pidcock , it’s described as “the concept of breaking UX research down into its constituent parts”:

Experiments: “We did this…” Facts: “…and we found out this…” Insights: “…which makes us think this…” Conclusions: “…so we’ll do that.”

Atomic research nuggets help to fight ‘bad research memory’—the idea that knowledge gets lost or forgotten amid the depths of a larger report. These nuggets are accessible, usable, and searchable. They can be delivered (or accessed) throughout an entire product build, serving as North Stars for micro goals. Research nuggets can be a firm reminder your team is, or isn’t, taking the right action.

user research presentation

7. Pre-recorded video: for better knowledge retention

People retain 90% of the information they receive via video versus text. There’s no question that, for many, video is a better way of onboarding and remembering information. At the same time, it can be easier to share information via video if your UX researchers aren’t the most confident of writers.

Although pre-recorded video is an easy way to share a UX research report with a team, as with other formats on this list, you’ll need to ensure people actually watch it.

Loom can be a great screen-sharing video recording tool. Some of their features and paid plans will enable you to see who from your team has watched your video, as well as spark conversation and engagement opportunities throughout the video. Alternatively, you can share the video as a watch-along during a synchronous meeting and discuss afterwards, while still sharing the video with those who can’t attend live.

8. Case studies: for sticky storytelling

Case studies aren’t just for winning potential customers. At their very core, case studies are put together to convince someone of something due to a real-life story. This is why they can be great if your UX research report needs to convince a diverse or largely cautious selection of stakeholders.

What’s more, case studies tend to rely on storytelling tactics and a strong narrative to get their point across. They can pull from user personas to further a point and make it more relatable for your design team. Muhammad Ahmad , UX Designer at VentureDive, shares the value presenting reports as case studies holds:

“Case studies show how you think. As a UX Researcher or Designer, how you percieve problems and what framework you use to evaluate them matters a lot. Your case studies are supposed to show just that.”

9. Maze reports: for all-in-one research and reporting

user research presentation

Automate your reporting with Maze. Maze automatically generates a report for each test you run, turning it into an easy-to-navigate dashboard. Add comments to generate conversation, highlight key responses and generate usability scores for your prototype testing .

If you’re working with moderated research, Maze AI can speed up the reporting process with automated sentiment tagging, project naming, and even generating summaries and identifying critical learnings from user interviews . So you can sit back, and let Maze take care of the data processing.

When you’re happy with your report, generate a custom link that you can share with your team, and further internal and external stakeholders.

Using Maze reports will enable you to share:

  • Introduction and mission slides
  • An analysis of each UX research method: From card sorting to live website testing
  • In-depth breakdowns of research data
  • Overviews of the report metrics: From misclicks to bounce rates and time-on-screen
  • A usability score

These reports will also allow you to download CSV files of your data, and customzie filters and views to bring your stakeholders the numbers they need, fast. Your team will be able to collaborate in a comments section and let AI identify key themes and takeaways if you’re struggling to spot them.

Overall, UX research tools with in-built reporting are a great way to translate and share all of your research into visual data sets that can be digested by the rest of the team in a few clicks.

7 UX research report templates

There are some fantastic research report templates to help get you started on your journey. Here are some of our favorites to help you better present those deliverables, key learnings, and everything in between.

Maze: Usability testing report

user research presentation

Hosted on Pitch, this report template is clear, simple, and follows a lot of the design and framework best practices shared in this chapter.

Access the template here

Aadil Khan: UXR report with examples

user research presentation

A straightforward report template is designed by Aadil Khan , UX Researcher at IBM, who says: “I made this template based on tons of mentoring calls I’ve been in with people looking to land UXR jobs where we discuss how to present UXR case studies during interviews and such. Oftentimes their case studies were too lengthy and lacked some sort of narrative structure to make it easier to present.”

EaTemp: Key findings report

user research presentation

A beautifully-designed template hosted on Figma. Get access to personas, empathy maps, and card sorting. All colors, fonts, and shapes are customizable.

Miro: Research repository template

user research presentation

Build a centralized research hub on Miro. Connect your team in a few clicks and allow them to collaborate with this free template. Note: you’ll need to sign up for a (free) Miro account.

Furquan Ahmad: UX research report template

user research presentation

A sleek and vibrant presentation, this template was created by Furquan Ahmad , Product Designer at Meta, “to help people focus their energy and time on the insights they're providing rather than worry about what the presentation will look like. I'm always shocked at how many people have benefited from the community.”

Estefanía Montaña Buitrago: Atomic UX research canvas

user research presentation

Beautifully designed on FigJam, this canvas by Estefanía Montaña Buitrago , UX Designer at Globant, has been used by over 7,000 people and now comes with several useful remixes too.

Muhammad Ahmad: UX research kit

user research presentation

Muhammad Ahmad , UX Designer at VentureDive, shared this minimalistic template. Here you’ll get 60+ customizable templates in both light and dark modes. There’s a free version, or a (paid) premium version which may be worth the investment for you.

Best practices for writing an effective UX research report

The functionality of your research report will come down to how you write it. Sitting down and being faced with copious amounts of data can make UX reporting feel like a daunting task—here’s some techniques and tips to help you along the way.

Take a leaf from your UX design book with user-friendly copy

No matter the format, you want your UX report to be as accessible and skim-able as possible for your audience. It’s a good idea to mimic some of the same mentalities you would use in UX design.

Gestalt grouping principles are good to consider for UX report writing. Think similarity , proximity , and common-region for grouping relevant information.

Similarly, UI design principles such as the figure-ground and focal point will help direct your readers’ eyes to the most important information first, as well as make for a more accessible read.

Lastly, Gestalt’s continuity principle is a great one to apply to your UX report. Readers naturally follow patterns for easier flows in information, so if you’re including stylistic elements like bolding, italics, asides, indenting, or something else, ensure these run consistently throughout your report.

At the same time, think about the structure, layout, and formatting of your written report. Are you leaving enough negative space for your reader to process information? These are especially important for readers with dyslexia, but will generally lift your readability on the whole:

  • Is all of your copy aligned left?
  • Is your font choice clear with a good amount of spacing between letters and words?
  • Are you bolding important words and sentences rather than underlining them?
  • Are you peppering your report with enough headings and subheadings?

Release oxytocin: Follow storytelling tactics

A Forbes article reported that “immersive storytelling releases the empathy-related chemical oxytocin in our brains.” If you’re not familiar with oxytocin, it’s known as a natural ‘feel-good’ chemical, promoting feelings of trust and attachment.

Why else do you think case studies are so effective? They rely on storytelling: they have characters, plots, beginnings, endings, peaks, and pits. User research reports that mimic storytelling threads and tactics are more likely to create sticky data points, as well as hold your readers’ attention throughout. This is why the PAS framework works so well, but whatever format your report takes, bear in mind a story-like structure with a beginning, middle, and end.

Ask your editor to edit your research presentation with the three Cs in mind

Clear , Concise , Compelling . These core principles exist everywhere the written word does, but it can be hard to spot them when editing your own work. Just because something is clear, concise, and compelling for you, doesn’t mean it is for someone else—ask a colleague to read your report (or, better yet—a content editor).

Failing that, if you don’t have access to an editor or are in a time crunch, here are some tools to help you edit your own work.

  • Grammarly: Good for catching those little typos and grammatical errors
  • Hemingway Editor: Gives a readability score and helps to simplify sentences

Consider your reader, and rethink the jargon

Tailoring your report to meet the needs and knowledge level of each stakeholder is a balancing act. Many will tell you to avoid jargon, acronyms, and technical language at all costs. But, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, using industry jargon is the most direct way of getting your point across, and if you know your reader understands it, go for it.

However, keep in mind that if your report is going to other teams: sales, C-suite, finance, etc, then you may need to find alternative terms that aren’t department-specific—or provide a glossary or acronym dictionary within the report.

Muhammad shares more: “Typically UX folks (or even product folks) are not that well-equipped with research terminologies. So giving them the summary of the research in plain language is the approach that works best for me.”

Wrapping up how to present user research findings

There you have it, a complete guide on how you can write and present your user experience research in a way that everyone can benefit from it.

Remember, be conscious of your audience, your format, and your language. Different stakeholders and team cultures require different reporting styles, it’s up to you to curate the information into a report that delivers the insights you’ve uncovered.

Generate UX reports that have impact

From AI-generated summaries of your user interviews, to usability scores for your prototype tests, automate UX research reporting with Maze.

user research presentation

Finish reading

  • How To Present Your User Research Findings

User research can be an essential and incredibly effective tool to grow your business, but how do we show the value of this research to our teams?

The need to develop a nuanced understanding of your customers' needs is essential for a product to succeed. We have discussed how user research can be an essential and incredibly effective tool for this, but how do we show the value of this research to our teams? How do we use this data to generate insights that we can share with our companies? 

User research is a key practice for discovering your customer’s behaviors and incentives. The ability to relay this information back to your team for optimal impact is a key driver of success. Understanding what consumers are expecting is essential for sustainability and growth. 

Using Metrics Effectively

Metrics are an incredibly effective way to grab stakeholder attention. Do you need to convey consumer interest, frustrations, expectations, the usability of a product, or something else? We have already discussed the importance of asking targeted questions that provide the information you want, but how do we use that information? 

Metrics are essential to summarize information from your user interviews and communicate the results with stakeholders. They can be used in various ways – communicating summarized data or, more impactfully, conveying statistically significant data to your teams that they must act upon. Not only will this assist your company in reaching its goals, but it will also quickly solidify your value to your team. 

In short, to deliver an excellent presentation to your team:

  • You need to link the data you tracked in your user research to information that your team will care about.
  • You need to captivate the team with a compelling story
  • And you need to ensure that the team can easily understand your presentation.

It is critical to convey value to your team through our data when presenting to your team. But how do we do this effectively? In short, success lies in how your results answer a specific question that your team had or how they highlight a new finding that can improve your team’s business operations. 

Let’s consider these points in the context of an actual presentation.

Presentation Strategies in Practice: Example 1

“You need to link the data you tracked in your user research to information that your team will care about.”

The first strategy involves focusing on actionable insights into the questions that your stakeholders want to know. Do they want to know the specific way a client uses a particular product function? 

Consider the following points as a guide for the three primary criteria to include in your presentation:

  • The specific ways that a user engages with a specific feature.
  • Why do users engage with a product or feature in this way?
  • The way the product is used or could be used has on a company’s bottom line or productivity. 

Breaking this information down will help your team understand consumer behavior and develop action plans based on the data. You must link the specific metric you track to the value it generates for your team, and here is how to do it.

  • Your financial services team has recently launched a new application through their company that promotes financial transparency by automatically tracking expenses for users via categories, such as food, recreation, rent, house bills, and other categories. You conduct several user interviews and found that consumers want to use this application to control their spending in key areas. You tracked a metric related to the use of this application.  
  • However, users are frustrated with the strict categories; the application doesn't allow them to account for specific differences such as "eating out" vs. "food purchases at the grocery store and cooked at home." Your users cannot truly understand their financial behavior in this area based on this model. You have identified that they engage (or want to engage) with the product to self-monitor financial behavior.
  • Based on these user interviews, you also know these consumers have begun seeking other options that allow them to track these data, impacting company sales. You present this data to the team by showing how many users the application has, how many users prefer additional financial tracking features, and how much business has been lost to other competition. You have linked the metric related to the use of this application and the value it could generate for the company by showing how they can use this data to increase their sales. 

Categories are a powerful tool for communicating and summarizing the needs of consumers to your team – did the user interview participants  feel that they needed to track the difference in food costs? Was this preference enough for them to actively choose another product that could lead to your company losing sales? Whether yes or no, this could be an essential tool you can use to communicate the value of the research your team can produce. 

Presentation Strategies in Practice: Example 2

“You need to captivate the team with a compelling story.”

The second strategy involves going a bit beyond looking at the data. Once you've analyzed your interview results and compiled them into reportable information for your stakeholders, you can use this information to understand how your team can achieve its goals. Rather than focusing on what users said they wanted, present analytics with a compelling story that can meet consumer demands. Summarizing your interview research into actionable insights with a story that speaks to your team will increase the value of your presentation.

Consider the previous example, in which the financial services company must diversify the categories that expenses are filed in so that clients can better understand their spending habits. Implementing a larger list of categories based on client feedback will lead your team’s clients to have an improved understanding of their spending habits. This will, in turn, increase sales and improve customer retention rates. Using a story that communicates this need while speaking directly to the stakeholder is beneficial. Here is an example of what you might say to accomplish this during your presentation.

  • "User A and B are a young couple who are saving to buy their first home, and they are expecting a newborn. Naturally, finances are a bit tight right now, and they need to prioritize saving some money. Now, this family has a rule where they can eat out for lunch during the workday, but that’s it. How much money do they spend on groceries vs. eating out? Let’s say that User A and B look at their expenses and find that they spend an equal amount on going out and grocery shopping each month, and it’s time to track their spending each day so they can make changes and maximize their savings. They turn to our product; however, these users find that they can’t track information this way. Frustrated with the idea of tracking this information themselves each month, these users delete our application and begin searching for alternatives”. You have told a story that successfully communicated how a User would utilize the product, why they engaged with it, and the value of this information to your team.

Presentation Strategies in Practice: Example 3

“The impact that the way the product is used or could be used has on a company’s bottom line or productivity.”

There are many tools to analyze and synthesize data, so it is critical only to use your team's information and presentation techniques. If we consider the above example, several considerations could impact how this information is received. 

One consideration is to focus on the technology used. Does your team use the most up-to-date software? Do they understand products that offer advanced visuals, or would they prefer more traditional data summaries in Excel? It is important to consider these presentation modalities to select the appropriate path forward that optimizes your team’s engagement. 

Another consideration is to know what your stakeholders want and need. Depending on your product, they could need information on engagement, use, sales, demographic usage, competition, and more. 

  • In the above example, if your team is primarily focused on figuring out why sales of their financial services are dropping, you may use software that can communicate declining sales through data visualization techniques (such as Microsoft Excel, rather than Microsoft Word). Further, you may want to tailor your language to focus on user expectations' impact on sales rather than prioritizing a presentation on ways to optimize product features. While these presentation tactics can ultimately communicate similar messages, you must consider how the message will be received. When you consider the team's optimal way to receive your message, you can make appropriate changes to ensure your company easily digests the information.

The benefits of user research presentations are vast. You can gain insight into your stakeholders' expectations and how they receive data, learn information, and then act upon it. Though there are many challenges of user research and presenting findings that are most impactful to clients, it is a valuable tool for discovering consumer insights and actionable improvements to products, business processes, and how clients perceive an organization. 

Recommend Resources:

  • How to Recruit Participants for Qualitative Research
  • 10 Smart Tips for Conducting Better User Interviews
  • 50 Powerful Questions You Should Ask In Your Next User Interview

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How to Present User Research Insights to Different Audiences

user research presentation

As UX researchers, we know about the pain points, challenges, and experiences of the people we research. This is because we heard them struggle to accomplish a task or saw them light up when speaking about a memory. Yet how can we convey our learnings to those we work with in the right depth?  

Oftentimes presenting the results of user research is a crucial moment to convey what you've found to other team members and help them make the right decisions. We already discussed how to create an engaging user research presentation (with a slide template). However, to increase the impact of UX research, it's best to tailor your presentation to different audiences. This topic was recently discussed in our UX Research Munich Community talk with Moira Mastrone, a senior UX researcher from MediaMarktSaturn. She shared valuable pieces of advice on how to present user research insights and make them stick with your audience. Taking inspiration from Moira's talk, this article explores the question of how to present UX research learnings to different audiences in more detail.

Tips to keep your audience engaged

#1 define your audience and presentation goals, #2 use relevant language and examples, for designers, for developers, for managers, #3 plan your presentation’s logistic, watch recording 🎥.

The same presentation would not engage every listener. If you want to deliver the value of your research findings, an essential step to take is adapting your presentation to your audience and preparing in advance.

Read our 3 tips to make sure you are confident when sharing your research insights in front of any company role.

As a first step, take some time to think about to whom you are presenting your findings. Are you planning to talk to product managers, UX designers, developers, or a different audience? What if your listeners come from various roles? Knowing that in advance will help you set your presentation goals. You might aim for informing your audience, sharing insights, convincing them, building credibility, or revealing your expertise. As a result, the type of audience and the presentation goals should guide your storytelling.

„Trying to target general audiences, such as “all stakeholders”, will often result in muddled communications.“

user research presentation

First step when building a storyline, consider how much the people you are talking to know about your topic already. It's always useful to briefly explain the topic because not everyone's familiar with it. Then, come back to the goals of your talk and think of the main takeaway for your audience that you would like them to remember. Knowing that will help you stay focused during your presentation.

Here is a short checklist on what to aim for with your UX Research presentation:

Easy to understand : Make sure your audience understands your findings as quickly as possible.

Easy to care : Try to increase their empathy so that your audience feels motivated to act.

Easy to action : Make them go straight to the solution once they understand the problem.

Easy to share : Sharing and accessing research findings should be easy. Then there's simply no excuse for not seeing them.

When your audience is defined, think of how you can speak to them in their language. Don’t forget about empathy, communication, and culture when you are presenting. Simply put, don’t use too many technical terms in front of a non-technical listener. Instead, try to double down on the strength of your qualitative research and use interview quotes as illustrative examples to drive audience engagement. See the one below, where a user struggles to reach a button:

Apart from communication, be sure your slides are adapted to suit your audience. The information you include is as important as how you present it. That means your presentation, including slides or other deliverables, should contain different sections based on the audience's goals because people in different roles don’t look for the same levels of evidence.

Let’s jump straight into examples of how to make a UX Research presentation stick with 3 different audiences:

Imagine you give a talk in front of UX designers and present them with your latest research insights. As Janet M. Six already stated, understanding the why's of users' needs and behaviors would be the most important finding for UX designers to have a holistic view of users when creating designs for them. 

This is when you should go beyond the surface meaning of your data analytics. It’s even better to involve designers in the planning and research session even before the presentation. If not possible, share your research insights with a focus on the following elements to provide the most valuable learnings:

users’ characteristics and knowledge, 

the tasks they are trying to perform (why, when, and where?), 

users’ pain points,

the technology they are using.

Consider summarizing those findings in typical UX research deliverables, such as Personas or Journey Maps. Let your presentation walk the audience through the elements of your artifacts and make this the starting point for a deeper discussion.

If you are presenting your UX research findings to developers, focus on the information that might affect the implementation of their current project. For example, design or workflow changes. To get a better understanding of engineers’ perspectives, read the learnings from interviewing several software developers about their involvement in UX research by Taylor Palmer. In a nutshell, the author observed that sharing research insights with developers leads to better technical solutions, creating user advocates, and establishing emotional connections. Again, we think it’s always better to involve all stakeholders, including developers, to observe research sessions and get in touch with research data besides the presentation, if there’s a possibility.

In your slides, stick to a common user-centric vocabulary and highlight the relevant information. You can have a high-level summary of your learnings and explain the main findings nearby. In that way, the development team can go back to your presentation notes later and easily navigate through key insights. 

However, more detailed data might also be very useful if it can help an engineer understand the user during implementation. Share a condensed version of your interview notes or short video recordings along with your presentation. The most involved engineers will get a holistic view of your research and be fully informed about its outcomes.

Sooner or later, every UX researcher presents their findings to managers, let it be a product, a project manager, or even a C-level executive. Typically, they wouldn’t have much time, so you need to be concise and illustrate how the UX research findings might impact the business goals. In short, identify all research issues that you can explain clearly, and present the main ones. 

„Once you have hooked them into the problem and they are asking questions, that's the time to go into more detail or complex variants.“

user research presentation

Don’t spend too much time on the methodology section, unless you’re asked to do so. Instead, go strictly to the point and try to tie your findings to the company objectives or KPIs.

Make your data arguments compelling and strong for the managers to understand why they should consider your research when making decisions. 

If relevant, enrich your qualitative findings with some quantitative metrics: maybe you notice a high user bounce rate or low user retention. Visualize your findings and include simple charts, graphs, or even some creditable statistics from secondary research in your presentation. As many business roles work with numbers and statistics every day, such visualizations may be an easy read for your audience.

At the same time, don’t fall into the trap of quantifying UX Research findings (no matter what!). Make sure to include video fragments from the interview. For example, you can easily create highlight reels , showing real users talking about having problems. Paired with metrics, this helps to convey your insights in the best way.

user research presentation

Double down on the emotional depth of UX research findings

The last stage you should plan when preparing your presentation is how it will happen. Don’t forget about the basics. If you’re giving a talk in person, try making eye contact and remember that your body language is as important as your voice. If presenting remotely, make sure your listeners can hear you clearly, and that your slides are easily readable from the screen. 

At the same time, communication before and after your talk plays a big role. When you send an invitation for your presentation, give your reader a hint to attract their attention and ask them when they can see the rest. Put some time pressure to stress the value of your research results. Moira suggests revealing a snippet of your research insights to make the audience interested in hearing more:

Thumbnail for video

After giving a talk, you would probably want to share the presentation slides with your audience. Here are some tips on how to create good follow-up communication: 

Start with a short introductory text, reminding when the meeting took place and what slides or deliverables were presented

Briefly explain the topic of your UX research project

Provide project background and objectives

Finally, give a summary of the main findings (though we hope your detailed presentation will be opened and explored in more depth, of course) 

If available, also attach the recording of your talk

Last but not least: the presentation slides you share. Create a separate version for sharing and include additional explanations, which your audience might read on their own. Still, often the slides won’t be enough. Most probably, you will be asked to share some research notes or interview video snippets. 

To avoid having a huge email attachment with the video files and archives, you can simply include a link to a sharable research report . For example, you can use Condens as an internal research repository and provide access to research summaries, video snippets, charts, and other documents within one shareable page. Many stakeholders will appreciate and benefit from an easy-way to learn more about the research highlights and experiencing them by watching selected research highlights and user quotes in an engaging format.

As key takeaways, remember the following:

Always pay attention to your audience, from preparing the slides to planning the communication and language around your presentation. 

Think of a clear storyline, containing an intro, the main topic, and conclusions. 

Synthesize your raw notes into something meaningful to your target audience and include illustrative user quotes. 

Finally, give access to detailed research reports for those who want to build a full understanding of your study’s outcome. 

If you tailor your presentation to your listeners' group, you will have a greater chance of making an impact. 

This article is inspired by Moira Mastrone’s talk at UX Research Munich Meetup in November 2022. You can watch the full talk here:

Thumbnail for video

Anna is a Product Marketing Specialist at Condens. Coming from a B2B tech startup and having an academic background in consumer technology adoption behavior, she is passionate about driving software products and exploring how people use them. Anna contributes to the UX Research community with content in all formats from long-form articles or snackable social media takeaways to organizing in-depth user research talks, always focused on finding new angles and providing useful input.

user research presentation

Moira Mastrone is a Senior UX Researcher at MediaMarktSaturn. She is supporting her team to learn about their users. Moira is also an active member of the Munich UX Research Community and a mentor for ADPList, where she is eager to exchange knowledge in the field and connect with research fellows.

UX Presentation-web

UX Presentation Template

Deliver your user research findings and get your team on the same page with this UX Presentation Template.

Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies

About the UX Presentation Template 

You’ve done the research and know what your users are looking for. Now, you need to share this information with your team. 

Use the UX Presentation Template to deliver your research in a captivating and engaging format. Help your team understand what makes your customers tick, how they behave online, and what they’re looking for throughout the buying journey. 

What is a UX presentation? 

A user experience (UX) presentation delivers user research findings to team members across the business. It compiles months of customer research and user testing into an easily digestible format.

From UX designers to product managers, a user research presentation template helps everyone understand how consumers interact with your business. As a result, you can identify the best ways to improve their experience. 

What should be included in a UX presentation? 

A UX presentation should have three core elements: 

Research. To prepare for this presentation, you’ll have conducted user research. This includes customer surveys, usability testing, focus groups, A/B testing, and more.In the presentation, you’ll discuss the strategy behind your research and examine your findings. 

Recommendations. Using the data from your user research, your presentation will outline your recommendations for the next steps. For example, if you have a high cart abandonment rate, you might suggest tweaking some design elements to improve the final stage of the buyer’s journey.

Collaboration. At the end of the presentation, you’ll encourage your audience to share their thoughts and ask questions. This is a great opportunity to explore new ideas, prioritize the most important tasks, and get everyone on the same page. 

How to use the UX Presentation Template  

Miro’s workspace is the perfect location to gather UX design ideas, collect your data, and set up your slides. When you’re ready to create your presentation, select this UX Presentation Template to get the ball rolling. Then, follow these steps to create the ideal presentation for your business. 

Step 1: Customize the presentation

When you access the template, you’ll notice the placeholder text. You can easily edit this text to outline the purpose of your research, what you were expecting to find, and the results.You can also change the order of your slide deck and add more slides to create the perfect format for your presentation. If you want to add your company's color scheme and branding, that’s not a problem. Simply add your color scheme and upload your brand assets. 

Step 2: Add your UX research to the template

With your new structure in place, you can add your customer research and design insights to the presentation. Upload images and use Miro’s charts and shapes to display your data in a visually appealing yet simple way.

Step 3: Outline your ideas for improvement

Following your research, you’ll need a section showing your audience your action plan. Use the research to back up your ideas and suggest areas of improvement. 

Step 4: Schedule time for collaboration

Leave space in your presentation agenda for conducting a brainstorming session to discuss ideas. This will be your chance to start a dialogue with your audience and open the floor for questions. They’ll be able to share their thoughts and help you find the best way to move forward. 

Step 5: Get feedback for improvement

Before you deliver the presentation, share your presentation with colleagues to get feedback. This will allow you to make last-minute changes and ensure the presentation is fully equipped. 

Step 6: Deliver the presentation

To start the presentation, jump into Miro’s presentation mode . This will automatically display your presentation on a full screen, and you can use the arrow buttons or keys to move between slides.

How long should a UX presentation be?

It depends on how much information you have to present and how big the brainstorming session is. Typically speaking, it’s no longer than an hour. But it could be longer if you have a lot of ground to cover and a large audience. The most important thing is to create and share an agenda beforehand, so everyone knows roughly how long the presentation will last.

How should you structure a UX presentation?

The presentation itself should be in chronological order. Think of it like telling a story. You want to start from the beginning and move through the different elements to create a full picture. First, present your findings. Then, lay out the problems. Finally, wrap things up by inviting your team to brainstorm the best solutions. This format gives your audience a clear picture of how your users interact with your business and what you can do to improve their experience. If your presentation jumps all over the place, it’ll be harder for them to follow.

Do you have to do presentations as a UX designer?

For most UX designers and developers, delivering user experience presentations is part of the job. You have to sell your ideas to get the green light from clients or C-level staff. But we know that public speaking doesn’t come naturally to everyone. If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of delivering a presentation, use a professional presentation template. Knowing that you have a solid presentation in place can relieve some of the pressure.

What’s included in this UX Presentation Template?

In this UX Presentation Template, you get access to Miro’s ready-made slide deck. Each slide is a frame, and it’s completely customizable. You can edit the placeholder text, change the order of the slides, and add or remove slides. With this template, you’ll also get access to Miro’s infinite canvas. Use our digital workspace to work through ideas and access over 300 templates to help your team collaborate as efficiently as possible.

Get started with this template right now.

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Portfolio Presentation Template

Works best for:.

Presentations, UX Design

Display your work in an engaging and visually-appealing format with Miro’s Portfolio Presentation Template. Exhibit your best work and help your audience visualize your designs.

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Product Roadmap Presentation Template

Presentations, Roadmaps

Use the Product Roadmap Presentation Template to outline your plan for product development. Whether starting from scratch with a new product or updating an existing product, delivering a roadmap presentation aligns your team and keeps partners in the loop.

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QBR Presentation Template

Presentations, Meetings

Use Miro’s QBR Presentation Template to give clients an overview of their business performance and show where you can add more value. Review your successes over the past 90 days and create a plan of action for the next quarter.

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Demo Presentation Template

Present your ideas confidently and professionally with this Demo Presentation Template. Use it to show potential and existing customers how your product or service works so they can fully appreciate its value.

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Simple Presentation Template

Presentations

Designed to remove the clutter and communicate the most important information in a clear and visually appealing way, our Simple Presentation Template will keep your audience’s eyes glued to the screen and their ears tuned into your voice — without having to add any fancy bells or whistles.

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Marketing Proposal Presentation Template

Presentations, Marketing

The Marketing Proposal Template is a simple outline you can use to quickly and easily structure your next bid for a project.

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How to conduct user research: A step-by-step guide

How to conduct user research - step by step guide

This is part one of a guide to User research.

Continue with part two: How to conduct user research: A Step-by-step guide

Continue with part three: What is exploratory research and why is it so exciting?

What user research did you conduct to reveal your ideal user?

Uh-oh. Not this question again. We both know the most common answer and it’s not great.

“Uhm, we talked to some users and had a brainstorming session with our team. It’s not much, but we don’t have time to do anything more right now. It’s better than nothing.”

Let’s be brutally honest about the meaning of that answer and rephrase it:

“ We don’t have time to get to know our actual user and maximize our chances of success. We’ll just assume that we know what they want and then wonder why the product fails at a later stage.”

If that sounds super bad, it’s because IT IS. You don’t want to end up in this situation. And you won’t.

After reading this guide, you’ll know exactly how to carry out the user research that will become your guiding star during product development.

On this page

Why is user research so important?

Step #1: define research objectives.

Go ahead – create that fake persona

Step #2: Pick your methods

Qualitative methods – the why, quantitative methods – the what, behavioral and attitudinal methods, step #3: find your participants, how to recruit participants, how many participants, step #4: conduct user research.

Focus groups

Competitive analysis

Field studies

What’s next?

User research can be a scary word. It may sound like money you don’t have, time you can’t spare, and expertise you need to find. That’s why some people convince themselves that it’s not that important.

Which is a HUGE mistake.

User research is crucial – without it, you’ll spend your energy, time and money on a product that is based around false assumptions that won’t work in the real world.

Let’s take a look at Segway, a technologically brilliant product with incredible introductory publicity. Although it’s still around, it simply didn’t reach initial expectations. Here are some of the reasons why:

  • It brought mockery, not admiration. The user was always “that guy”, who often felt fat or lazy.
  • Cities were not prepared for it. Neither users nor policemen knew if it should be used on the road or on the sidewalk.
  • A large segment of the target market comprised of postal and security workers. However, postal workers need both hands while walking, and security workers prefer bikes that don’t have a limited range.

Segway mainly fell short because of issues that could’ve been foreseen and solved by better user research.

Tim Brown, the CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO, sums it up nicely:

“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.”

? Bonus material Download User research checklist and a comparison table

Never forget – you are not your user.

You require proper user research to understand your user’s problems, pain points, needs, desires, feelings and behaviours.

Let’s start with the process!

Before you get in touch with your target users, you need to define why you are doing the research in the first place. 

Establish clear objectives and agree with your team on your exact goals – this will make it much easier to gain valuable insights. Otherwise, your findings will be all over the place.

Here are some sample questions that will help you to define your objectives:

  • What do you want to uncover?
  • What are the knowledge gaps that you need to fill?
  • What is already working and what isn’t?
  • Is there a problem that needs to be fixed? What is that problem?
  • What will the research bring to the business and/or your customers?

Once you start answering questions like these, it’s time to make a list of objectives. These should be specific and concise .

Let’s say you are making a travel recommendation app. Your research goals could be:

  • Understand the end-to-end process of how participants are currently making travel decisions.
  • Uncover the different tools that participants are using to make travel decisions.
  • Identify problems or barriers that they encounter when making travel decisions.

I suggest that you prioritize your objectives and create an Excel table. It will come in handy later.

Go ahead, create that fake persona

A useful exercise for you to do at this stage is to write down some hypotheses about your target users.

Ask yourself:

What do we think we understand about our users that is relevant to our business or product?

Yes, brainstorm the heck out of this persona, but keep it relevant to the topic at hand.

Here’s my empathy map and empathy map canvas to really help you flesh out your imaginary user.

Once you’re finished, research any and every statement , need and desire with real people.

It’s a simple yet effective way to create questions for some of the research methods that you’ll be using.

However, you need to be prepared to throw some of your assumptions out of the window. If you think this persona may affect your bias, don’t bother with hypotheses and dive straight into research with a completely open mind.

Alright, you have your research goals. Now let’s see how you can reach them.

Here’s the main question you should be asking yourself at this step in the process:

Based on our time and manpower, what methods should we select?

It’s essential to pick the right method at the right time . I’ll delve into more details on specific methods in Step #4. For now, let’s take a quick look at what categories you can choose from.

Qualitative research tells you ‘why’ something occurs. It tells you the reasons behind the behavior, the problem or the desire. It answers questions like: “ Why do you prefer using app X instead of other similar apps?” or “What’s the hardest part about being a sales manager? Why?” .

Qualitative data comes in the form of actual insights and it’s fairly easy to understand.

Most of the methods we’ll look at in Step #4 are qualitative methods.

Quantitative research helps you to understand what is happening by providing different metrics.

It answers questions such as “What percentage of users left their shopping cart without completing the purchase?” or “Is it better to have a big or small subscription button?”.

Most quantitative methods come in handy when testing your product, but not so much when you’re researching your users. This is because they don’t tell you why particular trends or patterns occur.

There is a big difference between “what people do” and “what people say”.

As their names imply, attitudinal research is used to understand or measure attitudes and beliefs, whereas behavioral research is used to measure and observe behaviors.

Here’s a practical landscape that will help you choose the best methods for you. If it doesn’t make sense now, return to it once you’ve finished the guide and you’ll have a much better understanding.

user research presentation

Source: Nielsen Norman Group

I’ll give you my own suggestions and tips about the most common and useful methods in Step #4 – Conducting research.

In general, if your objectives are specific enough, it shouldn’t be too hard to see which methods will help you achieve them.

Remember that Excel table? Choose a method or two that will fulfill each objective and type it in the column beside it.

It won’t always be possible to carry out everything you’ve written down. If this is the case, go with the method(s) that will give you most of the answers. With your table, it will be easy to pick and choose the most effective options for you.

Onto the next step!

user research presentation

This stage is all about channeling your inner Sherlock and finding the people with the secret intel for your product’s success.

Consider your niche, your objectives and your methods – this should give you a general idea of the group or groups you want to talk to and research further.

Here’s my advice for most cases.

If you’re building something from the ground up, the best participants might be:

  • People you assume face the problem that your product aims to solve
  • Your competitors’ customers

If you are developing something or solving a problem for an existing product, you should also take a look at:

  • Advocates and super-users
  • Customers who have recently churned
  • Users who tried to sign up or buy but decided not to commit

user research presentation

There are plenty of ways to bring on participants, and you can get creative so long as you keep your desired target group in mind.

You can recruit them online – via social media, online forums or niche community sites.

You can publish an ad with requirements and offer some kind of incentive.

You can always use a recruitment agency, too. This can be costly, but it’s also efficient.

If you have a user database and are changing or improving your product, you can find your participants in there. Make sure that you contact plenty of your existing users, as most of them won’t respond.

You can even ask your friends to recommend the right kind of people who you wouldn’t otherwise know.

With that said, you should always be wary of including friends in your research . Sure, they’re the easiest people to reach, but your friendship can (and probably will) get in the way of obtaining honest answers. There are plenty of horror stories about people validating their “brilliant” ideas with their friends, only to lose a fortune in the future. Only consider them if you are 100% sure that they will speak their mind no matter what.

That depends on the method. If you’re not holding a massive online survey, you can usually start with 5 people in each segment . That’s enough to get the most important unique insights. You can then assess the situation and decide whether or not you need to expand your research.

Finally! Let’s go through some of the more common methods you’ll be using, including their pros and cons, some pro tips, and when you should use them.

Engaging in one-on-one discussions with users enables you to acquire detailed information about a user’s attitudes, desires, and experiences. Individual concerns and misunderstandings can be directly addressed and cleared up on the spot.

Interviews are time-consuming, especially on a per participant basis. You have to prepare for them, conduct them, analyze them and sometimes even transcribe them. They also limit your sample size, which can be problematic. The quality of your data will depend on the ability of your interviewer, and hiring an expert can be expensive.

  • Prepare questions that stick to your main topics. Include follow-up questions for when you want to dig deeper into certain areas.
  • Record the interview . Don’t rely on your notes. You don’t want to interrupt the flow of the interview by furiously scribbling down your answers, and you’ll need the recording for any potential in-depth analysis later on.
  • Conduct at least one trial run of the interview to see if everything flows and feels right. Create a “playbook” on how the interview should move along and update it with your findings.
  • If you are not comfortable with interviewing people, let someone else do it or hire an expert interviewer. You want to make people feel like they are talking to someone they know, rather than actually being interviewed. In my experience, psychologists are a great choice for an interviewer.

Interviews are not really time-sensitive, as long as you do them before the development process.

However, they can be a great supplement to online surveys and vice-versa. Conducting an interview beforehand helps you to create a more focused and relevant survey, while conducting an interview afterwards helps you to explain the survey answers.

Surveys are generally conducted online, which means that it’s possible to gather a lot of data in a very short time for a very low price . Surveys are usually anonymous, so users are often more honest in their responses.

It’s more difficult to get a representative sample because it’s tough to control who takes part in the survey – especially if you post it across social media channels or general forums. Surveys are quite rigid and if you don’t account for all possible answers, you might be missing out on valuable data. You have to be very careful when choosing your questions – poorly worded or leading ones can negatively influence how users respond. Length can also be an issue, as many people hate taking long surveys.

  • Keep your surveys brief , particularly if participants won’t be compensated for their time. Only focus on what is truly important.
  • Make sure that the questions can be easily understood. Unclear or ambiguous questions result in data on which you can’t depend. Keep the wording as simple as possible.
  • Avoid using leading questions. Don’t ask questions that assume something, such as “What do you dislike about X?”. Replace this with “What’s your experience with X?”.
  • Find engaged, niche online communities that fit your user profile. You’ll get more relevant data from these.

Similar to interviews. It depends on whether you want to use the survey as a preliminary method, or if you want a lot of answers to a few, very focused questions.

Design Strategy Focus groups icon

Focus Groups

Focus groups are moderated discussions with around 5 to 10 participants, the intention of which is to gain insight into the individuals’ attitudes, ideas and desires.

As focus groups include multiple people, they can quickly reveal the desires, experiences, and attitudes of your target audience . They are helpful when you require a lot of specific information in a short amount of time. When conducted correctly, they can act like interviews on steroids.

Focus groups can be tough to schedule and manage. If the moderator isn’t experienced, the discussion can quickly go off-topic. There might be an alpha participant that dictates the general opinion, and because it’s not one-on-one, people won’t always speak their mind.

  • Find an experienced moderator who will lead the discussion. Having another person observing and taking notes is also highly recommended, as he or she can emphasize actionable insights and catch non-verbal clues that would otherwise be missed.
  • Define the scope of your research . What questions will you ask? How in-depth do you want to go with the answers? How long do you want each discussion to last? This will determine how many people and groups should be tested.
  • If possible, recruit potential or existing users who are likely to provide good feedback, yet will still allow others to speak their mind. You won’t know the participants most of the time, so having an experienced moderator is crucial.

Focus groups work best when you have a few clear topics that you want to focus on.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis highlights the strengths and weaknesses of existing products . It explores how successful competitors act on the market. It gives you a solid basis for other user research methods and can also uncover business opportunities. It helps you to define your competitive advantage , as well as identify different user types.

A competitive analysis can tell you what exists, but not why it exists. You may collect a long feature list, but you won’t know which features are valued most by users and which they don’t use at all. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell how well a product is doing, which makes the data less useful. It also has limited use if you’re creating something that’s relatively new to the market.

  • Create a list or table of information that you want to gather – market share, prices, features, visual design language, content, etc.
  • Don’t let it go stale. Update it as the market changes so that you include new competitors.
  • If you find something really interesting but don’t know the reason behind it, conduct research among your competitor’s users .
  • After concluding your initial user research, go over the findings of your competitive analysis to see if you’ve discovered anything that’s missing on the market .

It can be a great first method, especially if you’re likely to talk to users of your competitors’ products

user research presentation

Field Studies

Field studies are research activities that take place in the user’s context, rather than at your company or office. Some are purely observational (the researcher is a “fly on the wall”), others are field interviews, and some act as a demonstration of pain points in existing systems.

You really get to see the big picture –  field studies allow you to gain insights that will fundamentally change your product design . You see what people actually do instead of what they say they do. A field study can explain problems and behaviours that you don’t understand better than any other method.

It’s the most time-consuming and expensive method. The results rely on the observer more than any of the other options. It’s not appropriate for products that are used in rare and specific situations.

  • Establish clear objectives. Always remember why you are doing the research. Field studies can provide a variety of insights and sometimes it can be hard to stay focused. This is especially true if you are participating in the observed activity.
  • Be patient. Observation might take some time. If you rush, you might end up with biased results.
  • Keep an open mind and don’t ask leading questions. Be prepared to abandon your preconceptions, assumptions and beliefs. When interviewing people, try to leave any predispositions or biases at the door.
  • Be warm but professional. If you conduct interviews or participate in an activity, you won’t want people around you to feel awkward or tense. Instead, you’ll want to observe how they act naturally.

Use a field study when no other method will do or if it becomes clear that you don’t really understand your user. If needed, you should conduct this as soon as possible – it can lead to monumental changes.

We started with a user persona and we’ll finish on this topic, too. But yours will be backed by research 😉

A persona outlines your ideal user in a concise and understandable way. It includes the most important insights that you’ve discovered. It makes it easier to design products around your actual users and speak their language. It’s a great way to familiarize new people on your team with your target market.

A persona is only as good as the user research behind it. Many companies create a “should be” persona instead of an actual one. Not only can such a persona be useless, it can also be misleading.

  • Keep personas brief. Avoid adding unnecessary details and omit information that does not aid your decision making. If a persona document is too long, it simply won’t be used.
  • Make personas specific and realistic. Avoid exaggerating and include enough detail to help you find real people that represent your ideal user.

Create these after you’ve carried out all of the initial user research. Compile your findings and create a persona that will guide your development process.

Now you know who you are creating your product for – you’ve identified their problems, needs and desires. You’ve laid the groundwork, so now it’s time to design a product that will blow your target user away! But that’s a topic for a whole separate guide, one that will take you through the process of product development and testing 😉

PS. Don’t forget -> Here is your ? User Research Checklist and comparison table

About the author

Romina Kavcic profile image

Oh hey, I’m Romina Kavcic

I am a Design Strategist who holds a Master of Business Administration. I have 14+ years of career experience in design work and consulting across both tech startups and several marquee tech unicorns such as Stellar.org, Outfit7, Databox, Xamarin, Chipolo, Singularity.NET, etc. I currently advise, coach and consult with companies on design strategy & management, visual design and user experience. My work has been published on Forbes, Hackernoon, Blockgeeks, Newsbtc, Bizjournals, and featured on Apple iTunes Store.

More about me  *  Let’s connect on Linkedin   *  Let’s connect on Twitter

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Guides » UX Research Basics » UX Research Presentation

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UX Research Presentation

Learn how to design and structure an effective ux research presentation to showcase your research findings to teams and stakeholders..

user research presentation

Last update 03.07.2023

After you’ve created your research plan , recruited participants, conducted and analyzed the study results, it’s finally time to present your findings to colleagues, stakeholders and other people involved in the project. 

But how to make sure you nail the presentation, make it engaging, structured and most importantly – convincing?  

Read further to find our best tips for presenting the results of your UX research together with the collection of some of the best UX research presentation templates out there!

Key Takeaways: 

➡️ A UX research presentation is used to showcase your research findings to colleagues and stakeholders.

❗ It helps to influence decision-making , inspire action and generate empathy towards users and their problems.

✅ A research presentation is an alternative to a UX research report .

🧠 You don’t have to create a presentation from scratch, there are many free templates available online.

What is a UX research presentation? 

ux research presentation

A UX research presentation is the process of presenting research findings to colleagues and relevant stakeholders. The goal of conducting the UX research presentation is to communicate results of the research activities you’ve performed, share relevant insights and critical problems you’ve uncovered and propose ideas for solving them.

It can also be described as an alternative to a user research report . However, while user research reports are often presented in a form of long complicated documents, UX research presentation is a faster and more convenient way to present your findings in an easy to understand and visually appealing way.

The goal of a UX presentation

The primary goal of a UX research presentation is to effectively communicate your research findings to other people involved in the project. However, apart from that, it holds several other benefits:

  • Generate empathy : a good and engaging UX research presentation can help you explain user’s problems, needs and expectations to other team members and, therefore, generate empathy. This helps to humanize the user experience and shows its value even to people who may not understand it.
  • Influence decision-making : by demonstrating the findings of your research, explaining their value and importance, you get an opportunity to prioritize specific design changes and convince stakeholders to invest in UX . 
  • Facilitate collaboration : a UX presentation explains your research activities and their results in a way that is comprehensive for everyone, even the ones not involved in the product design process. This makes collaboration between teams easier, helps to spread awareness about the products, users and necessary changes. This collaborative approach encourages discussion and helps you come up with better solutions to users’ problems.
  • Inspire action: The ultimate goal of a UX presentation is to drive action and implementation of the research findings. You should not only explain the problem, but also your ideas and recommendations on how to solve them.

How to create engaging UX research presentations

ux research presentation

Let’s take a look at our 5 go-to tips on how to present research data in UX presentation:

1. Keep it short

Resist the urge to share every single detail of your research. Make your presentation relatively short and straight to the point. Focus on explaining the key insights and keep in mind your audience’s short attention spans. If you make the presentation too long, you risk boring them and losing their attention. 

Try to avoid putting any unnecessary information in your presentation and distill your research findings into clear, concise messages.

2. Show, don’t tell

The key in putting together a good UX Research presentation is making it highly visual. Empathize with your managers, stakeholders and other team members who haven’t been a part of your research process. They probably only have a vague understanding of the problem and presenting them with a few slides of plain text won’t make it much better. 

Your goal here is to create a clear and convincing showcase of the research process , the problem you’ve uncovered and your proposed solutions. To do that, focus on showing rather than telling . 

Imagine you’re talking about a specific problem users encounter, for example filling out the registration form. Instead of talking about it for 5 minutes straight, show a quick clip of a user experiencing that problem during a usability test. This will help to understand the problem better, empathize with the user and will save you time on long boring explanations.

3. Use storytelling

Make sure to use compelling visuals in order to support the story you’re telling.

4. Make it actionable

The main goal of your presentation is to highlight critical problems users face and present potential solutions. Therefore, after your presentation your audience should have a clear idea what needs to be done, how it will help and who is going to work on making the changes. 

Avoid being vague and unclear in your recommendation statements and focus on explaining and supporting your solutions with relevant data .

5. Encourage discussion

Encourage discussion among your audience as well as vocalizing any other questions , comments or concerns that arise. This will help to engage them even more and promote a better understanding of your research findings. 

And not only that! The biggest benefit of encouraging communication during your presentation is that by listening to their opinions and concerns you’re able to fine-tune your solutions to the problems, come up with better ones and overall just generate more effective ideas for improvement.

Things to avoid in a user research presentation

ux research presentation

When preparing a user research presentation it’s important to keep in mind potential pitfalls that can influence its effectiveness. Here’s a list of mistakes to avoid when presenting the results of your research:

  • Using too much jargon and technical language : remember, that not everyone in your audience is familiar with complex UX terms and internal jargon. Use a simple language, maybe even a conversational tone to make sure everyone understands what you’re talking about.
  • Lack of structure: going back to the topic of storytelling, try to organize the information you’re going to present in a structured manner and give it a logical flow. 
  • Cluttered slides: don’t overload your slides with information. Use concise bullet points, key phrases, and compelling visuals to convey information effectively. Make sure your presentation’s design is not too flashy, so that it doesn’t distract the audience. 
  • Getting lost in details : avoid focusing on little details that don’t matter and instead try to explain how your research findings and their implications can benefit the bigger picture and the product overall.
  • Lack of preparation : your presentation should be easy to listen to. Practice before you present and make sure that you don’t run through the slides, stutter or forget anything. A confident delivery will assure that the audience hears and understands you, instead of getting distracted by your poor presentation skills.

UX research presentation example

Now that you know the keys to effective research findings presentation, let’s take a look at an actual UX research presentation example. The UX research presentation example you see below is created by Visme and can be also used as a template, which we’ll also leave a link to.

This presentation is a great example of how you can provide an informative delivery of key insights and actionable recommendations.  

The structure of your UX research presentation can vary based on the objectives and the main information you want to convey, however, most of the times all presentations will follow a similar structure, same to the one in this UX research presentation example:

  • Research Methodology
  • Participant Profiles
  • Key Findings 
  • Recommendations

See full UX research presentation example .

ux research presentation example

UX Research Presentation Example. Source .

This example is great because it presents information in a quick and easy to understand manner, together with the clean minimalistic design. Therefore, the audience is able to gauge all the necessary details about the research in just a couple of slides. The only thing that it is lacking is more application of the “show, don’t tell” principle . 

Depending on the research method , we’d recommend adding some powerful quotes from the user tests , as well as video recordings of participants facing their primary problems with the product. This would help to generate empathy and help the audience understand users better. 

UX research presentation templates

1. ux research presentation template by visme.

ux research presentation template

A customizable colorful template that will help you condense the findings of your UX research into small bits and present them in a digestible way.

📥 Get the template

2. UX Presentation Template by Miro

ux research presentation

A template by one of the most popular whiteboarding platforms that is available on their free plan and is perfect for presenting your user research findings to the team.

3. User Research Presentation Template by Furquan Ahmad

ux research presentation template

A beautifully designed report template available to anyone in the Figma community. The author of the template even provides a video explaining the step-by-step process of creating a good UX research report.

4. UX Research Presentation Template by Decoding Research

ux research presentation

This is a paid template with 25+ slides to help you present your research findings. The template is available for download as PowerPoint and Keynote in English and Spanish.

5. Research Findings Presentation Template by Salman Farsi

ux research presentation template

A template created in Miro by an experienced Product Designer to speed up the report/finding presentation process and focus more on the content.

6. Usability Testing Results Presentation

ux research presentation template

A customizable template specifically to help you present your usability testing findings in a clear and visually appealing way.

📥 Get the template  

Wrapping up

Now that you know how to put together a UX research findings presentation, it’s time to take action! Conduct your study, empathize with users and do your best to solve their problems with your product.

And for the research part of it, UXtweak is always here and ready to help. Leverage our numerous UX tools, analyze data and generate custom PDF reports for your research presentations! Create a free account and start today!

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Give a Try to Our UX Research Tools!

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FAQ: UX Research Presentation

You can structure your research findings presentation in the following way:

  • Context: explain the problem and the background
  • Research Goals: describe what you were trying to achieve
  • Methods: what research methods did you use
  • Findings: Present the key insights
  • Analysis and recommendations: Interpret the findings and provide actionable next steps

When presenting UX research findings, consider the following tips:

  • Keep it short
  • Show, don’t tell
  • Use storytelling
  • Make it actionable
  • Encourage discussion

UX Research Framework

Ux research bootcamp, topics: ux research basics.

  • 01. UX Research Basics
  • 02. Remote User Research
  • 03. UX Research Plan
  • 04. UX Research Questions
  • 05. UX Research Methods
  • 06. Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research
  • 07. UX Research Process
  • 08. UX Research Report
  • 09. UX Research Framework
  • 10. UX Research Presentation
  • 11. UX Research Bootcamp

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UX Research Basics

Remote user research, ux research plan, ux research questions, ux research methods, quantitative vs. qualitative research, ux research process, ux research report.

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UX Research Cheat Sheet

Portrait of Susan Farrell

February 12, 2017 2017-02-12

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User-experience research methods are great at producing data and insights, while ongoing activities help get the right things done. Alongside R&D, ongoing UX activities can make everyone’s efforts more effective and valuable. At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep product-development efforts on the right track, in agreement with true user needs and not imaginary ones.

In This Article:

When to conduct user research.

One of the questions we get the most is, “When should I do user research on my project?” There are three different answers:

  • Do user research at whatever stage you’re in right now . The earlier the research, the more impact the findings will have on your product, and by definition, the earliest you can do something on your current project (absent a time machine) is today.
  • Do user research at all the stages . As we show below, there’s something useful to learn in every single stage of any reasonable project plan, and each research step will increase the value of your product by more than the cost of the research.
  • Do most user research early in the project (when it’ll have the most impact), but conserve some budget for a smaller amount of supplementary research later in the project. This advice applies in the common case that you can’t get budget for all the research steps that would be useful.

The chart below describes UX methods and activities available in various project stages.

A design cycle often has phases corresponding to discovery, exploration, validation, and listening, which entail design research, user research, and data-gathering activities. UX researchers use both methods and ongoing activities to enhance usability and user experience, as discussed in detail below.

Each project is different, so the stages are not always neatly compartmentalized. The end of one cycle is the beginning of the next.

The important thing is not to execute a giant list of activities in rigid order, but to start somewhere and learn more and more as you go along.

When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating methods each product cycle because they are aimed at different goals and types of insight. The chart below shows how often UX practitioners reported engaging in these methods in our survey on UX careers.

The top UX research activities that practitioners said they use at least every year or two, from most frequent to least: Task analysis, requirements gathering, in-person usability study, journey mapping, etc., design review, analytics review, clickable prototype testing, write user stories, persona building, surveys, field studies / user interviews, paper prototype testing, accessibility evaluation, competitive analysis, remote usability study, test instructions / help, card sorting, analyze search logs, diary studies

If you can do only one activity and aim to improve an existing system, do qualitative (think-aloud) usability testing , which is the most effective method to improve usability . If you are unable to test with users, analyze as much user data as you can. Data (obtained, for instance, from call logs, searches, or analytics) is not a great substitute for people, however, because data usually tells you what , but you often need to know why . So use the questions your data brings up to continue to push for usability testing.

The discovery stage is when you try to illuminate what you don’t know and better understand what people need. It’s especially important to do discovery activities before making a new product or feature, so you can find out whether it makes sense to do the project at all .

An important goal at this stage is to validate and discard assumptions, and then bring the data and insights to the team. Ideally this research should be done before effort is wasted on building the wrong things or on building things for the wrong people, but it can also be used to get back on track when you’re working with an existing product or service.

Good things to do during discovery:

  • Conduct field studies and interview users : Go where the users are, watch, ask, and listen. Observe people in context interacting with the system or solving the problems you’re trying to provide solutions for.
  • Run diary studies to understand your users’ information needs and behaviors.
  • Interview stakeholders to gather and understand business requirements and constraints.
  • Interview sales, support, and training staff. What are the most frequent problems and questions they hear from users? What are the worst problems people have? What makes people angry?
  • Listen to sales and support calls. What do people ask about? What do they have problems understanding? How do the sales and support staff explain and help? What is the vocabulary mismatch between users and staff?
  • Do competitive testing . Find the strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ products. Discover what users like best.

Exploration methods are for understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs appropriately.

  • Compare features against competitors.
  • Do design reviews.
  • Use research to build user personas and write user stories.
  • Analyze user tasks to find ways to save people time and effort.
  • Show stakeholders the user journey and where the risky areas are for losing customers along the way. Decide together what an ideal user journey would look like.
  • Explore design possibilities by imagining many different approaches, brainstorming, and testing the best ideas in order to identify best-of-breed design components to retain.
  • Obtain feedback on early-stage task flows by walking through designs with stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Ask for written reactions and questions (silent brainstorming), to avoid groupthink and to enable people who might not speak up in a group to tell you what concerns them.
  • Iterate designs by testing paper prototypes with target users, and then test interactive prototypes by watching people use them. Don’t gather opinions. Instead, note how well designs work to help people complete tasks and avoid errors. Let people show you where the problem areas are, then redesign and test again.
  • Use card sorting to find out how people group your information, to help inform your navigation and information organization scheme.

Testing and validation methods are for checking designs during development and beyond, to make sure systems work well for the people who use them.

  • Do qualitative usability testing . Test early and often with a diverse range of people, alone and in groups. Conduct an accessibility evaluation to ensure universal access.
  • Ask people to self-report their interactions and any interesting incidents while using the system over time, for example with diary studies .
  • Audit training classes and note the topics, questions people ask, and answers given. Test instructions and help systems.
  • Talk with user groups.
  • Staff social-media accounts and talk with users online. Monitor social media for kudos and complaints.
  • Analyze user-forum posts. User forums are sources for important questions to address and answers that solve problems. Bring that learning back to the design and development team.
  • Do benchmark testing: If you’re planning a major redesign or measuring improvement, test to determine time on task, task completion, and error rates of your current system, so you can gauge progress over time.

Listen throughout the research and design cycle to help understand existing problems and to look for new issues. Analyze gathered data and monitor incoming information for patterns and trends.

  • Survey customers and prospective users.
  • Monitor analytics and metrics to discover trends and anomalies and to gauge your progress.
  • Analyze search queries: What do people look for and what do they call it? Search logs are often overlooked, but they contain important information.
  • Make it easy to send in comments, bug reports, and questions. Analyze incoming feedback channels periodically for top usability issues and trouble areas. Look for clues about what people can’t find, their misunderstandings, and any unintended effects.
  • Collect frequently asked questions and try to solve the problems they represent.
  • Run booths at conferences that your customers and users attend so that they can volunteer information and talk with you directly.
  • Give talks and demos: capture questions and concerns.

Ongoing and strategic activities can help you get ahead of problems and make systemic improvements.

  • Find allies . It takes a coordinated effort to achieve design improvement. You’ll need collaborators and champions.
  • Talk with experts . Learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Get advice from people with more experience.
  • Follow ethical guidelines . The UXPA Code of Professional Conduct is a good starting point.
  • Involve stakeholders . Don’t just ask for opinions; get people onboard and contributing, even in small ways. Share your findings, invite them to observe and take notes during research sessions.
  • Hunt for data sources . Be a UX detective. Who has the information you need, and how can you gather it?
  • Determine UX metrics. Find ways to measure how well the system is working for its users.
  • Follow Tog's principles of interaction design .
  • Use evidence-based design guidelines , especially when you can’t conduct your own research. Usability heuristics are high-level principles to follow.
  • Design for universal access . Accessibility can’t be tacked onto the end or tested in during QA. Access is becoming a legal imperative, and expert help is available. Accessibility improvements make systems easier for everyone.
  • Give users control . Provide the controls people need. Choice but not infinite choice.
  • Prevent errors . Whenever an error occurs, consider how it might be eliminated through design change. What may appear to be user errors are often system-design faults. Prevent errors by understanding how they occur and design to lessen their impact.
  • Improve error messages . For remaining errors, don’t just report system state. Say what happened from a user standpoint and explain what to do in terms that are easy for users to understand.
  • Provide helpful defaults . Be prescriptive with the default settings, because many people expect you to make the hard choices for them. Allow users to change the ones they might need or want to change.
  • Check for inconsistencies . Work-alike is important for learnability. People tend to interpret differences as meaningful, so make use of that in your design intentionally rather than introducing arbitrary differences. Adhere to the principle of least astonishment . Meet expectations instead.
  • Map features to needs . User research can be tied to features to show where requirements come from. Such a mapping can help preserve design rationale for the next round or the next team.
  • When designing software, ensure that installation and updating is easy . Make installation quick and unobtrusive. Allow people to control updating if they want to.
  • When designing devices, plan for repair and recycling . Sustainability and reuse are more important than ever. Design for conservation.
  • Avoid waste . Reduce and eliminate nonessential packaging and disposable parts. Avoid wasting people’s time, also. Streamline.
  • Consider system usability in different cultural contexts . You are not your user. Plan how to ensure that your systems work for people in other countries . Translation is only part of the challenge.
  • Look for perverse incentives . Perverse incentives lead to negative unintended consequences. How can people game the system or exploit it? How might you be able to address that? Consider how a malicious user might use the system in unintended ways or to harm others.
  • Consider social implications . How will the system be used in groups of people, by groups of people, or against groups of people? Which problems could emerge from that group activity?
  • Protect personal information . Personal information is like money. You can spend it unwisely only once. Many want to rob the bank. Plan how to keep personal information secure over time. Avoid collecting information that isn’t required, and destroy older data routinely.
  • Keep data safe . Limit access to both research data and the data entrusted to the company by customers. Advocate for encryption of data at rest and secure transport. A data breach is a terrible user experience.
  • Deliver both good and bad news . It’s human nature to be reluctant to tell people what they don’t want to hear, but it’s essential that UX raise the tough issues. The future of the product, or even the company, may depend on decisionmakers knowing what you know or suspect.
  • Track usability over time . Use indicators such as number and types of support issues, error rates and task completion in usability testing, and customer satisfaction ratings, to show the effectiveness of design improvements.
  • Include diverse users . People can be very different culturally and physically. They also have a range of abilities and language skills. Personas are not enough to prevent serious problems, so be sure your testing includes as wide a variety of people as you can.
  • Track usability bugs . If usability bugs don’t have a place in the bug database, start your own database to track important issues.
  • Pay attention to user sentiment . Social media is a great place for monitoring user problems, successes, frustrations, and word-of-mouth advertising. When competitors emerge, social media posts may be the first indication.
  • Reduce the need for training . Training is often a workaround for difficult user interfaces, and it’s expensive. Use training and help topics to look for areas ripe for design changes.
  • Communicate future directions . Customers and users depend on what they are able to do and what they know how to do with the products and services they use. Change can be good, even when disruptive, but surprise changes are often poorly received because they can break things that people are already doing. Whenever possible, ask, tell, test with, and listen to the customers and users you have. Consult with them rather than just announcing changes. Discuss major changes early, so what you hear can help you do a better job, and what they hear can help them prepare for the changes needed.
  • Recruit people for future research and testing . Actively encourage people to join your pool of volunteer testers. Offer incentives for participation and make signing up easy to do via your website, your newsletter, and other points of contact.

Use this cheat-sheet to choose appropriate UX methods and activities for your projects and to get the most out of those efforts. It’s not necessary to do everything on every project, but it’s often helpful to use a mix of methods and tend to some ongoing needs during each iteration.

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Data & Design by Kai Wong

user research presentation

Improve UX research presentations with 3 minor writing tweaks

A quick guide to better user research presentations.

user research presentation

To be a great design storyteller, you must focus on your words. Well-designed presentations with precise wording can be a shortcut to storytelling.

After presenting user research for over a decade, I've noticed that the words on my slides often are just as critical as my points.

You might have observed this as well. While becoming a great design storyteller may involve practicing complex skills like public speaking, engaging wording can improve any presentation universally.

It starts with what you put at the top of each slide.

Descriptive titles and wasted opportunities

How many of you create slides with titles like these?

Introduction

Research Methods

User findings

These are called descriptive titles, which introduce the topic. There's nothing inherently wrong with using these titles, but they're often a wasted opportunity to help clarify your points.

The title is the first thing audiences encounter, and it can be crucial to capture their attention (especially if they're new to UX). This is why taking that extra step of thinking about and incorporating key takeaways into your titles can make a crucial difference.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, author of Storytelling with You , suggests that there are two important places to do this:

The Presentation title slide

Takeaway title slides

Presentation titles are about offering a quick preview

The presentation title slide should be a quick preview of what you'll discuss, designed to engage the audience.

For example, rather than just calling your presentation "User Research findings," incorporate your main point. For example, if most of your user findings were about navigation and task completion issues, you might add a title like "Let's learn where users get lost."

A presentation slide that says “Let’s learn where users get lost”, with a subtitle of user research findings

This makes it clear what this presentation will be about and helps you organize your big ideas.

You might be saying, "Well, I have a bunch of user findings, and I'm not quite sure what to focus on." Here's the bad news: if you have no idea what you want your team to address, neither will they. More importantly, you probably do have some idea of what to focus on.

If you're providing them with 10 points of usability issues, would you be okay if they pulled out a dartboard to figure out which 3 to address? Probably not.

A presentation title like this doesn't mean you have to hide any issues unrelated to this idea completely; it just means you're prioritizing these issues.

This is where the other title comes into play: takeaway titles.

Takeaway titles provide an overview of your audience's needs

Imagine that your presentation is going to be referenced later on. People will dig through your slide deck to find the points you referenced and show them to others.

Could they quickly find the points they want to reference, or would it be a struggle?

That's the idea behind takeaway titles. These aim to capture what this slide is about at a glance, with the bullet points underneath being things in more detail.

A blank presentation slide with the title “Many users fail to check out. Why?”

This leads to the next important issue.

Your bullet points are not a teleprompter

One of the first and most common mistakes is that many write everything they need to say on the slide. As a result, they read the text directly off each slide, leading to boring presentations.

Audiences will read faster than you talk, so they will quickly grow tired and give up on your presentation.

A sample of F-pattern reading on an exhaustive and boring bullet point slide. There are arrows, shaped like an F, that shows how users will read a very very long slide with 7 bullet points and a ton of detail.

If you need to write down what you will say (i.e., it's hard to memorize), first know that there's a "Notes" view in Powerpoint that's invisible to the audience but can help you.

What should you include instead? They're an overview of your discussion points that piques the audience's attention and explains where you will go next.

The previous blank slide about users failing to check out supported by additional details. These include “Analytics showing high abandonment rate”, “Users expressing frustration aroun workflow”, “Best practices around login walls”, and “Design recommendations.

Lastly, you may want to apply these ideas to one of user research's most potent tools: user quotes.

Emphasize your takeaways from user quotes.

User quotes are often a persuasive argument, straight from the user's mouth, that you may want to include in presentations.

They're some of the most compelling ways we have as designers to convince the rest of the team to follow our advice. Unfortunately, they also tend to become large blocks of text.

A user quote that’s a very long block of text.

As a result, it can be tricky for the team to focus on what you want to pay attention to. The solution, then, is to create a visual hierarchy around the parts of the quote that you want to emphasize.

Use a relevant slide title.

One of the easiest things to start with is to ensure that the title accurately reflects what you want them to gather from the quote. That way, even if they don't read the quote, they know what it's about.

Create a visual hierarchy to draw attention to the specific wording

If there's one sentence, in particular, you want them to pay attention to, consider using selective highlighting to draw their attention to it.

A modified user quote with visual hierarchy applied. The title “Customers don’t like login walls”, is supported by one sentence that is enlarged and bolded: “I mean I’m giving you my credit card information, address, and all that stuff: why do I have to create an account?”

This doesn't just apply to user quotes but to any visualizations you want to create. Ensure that the elements are highlighted correctly in a way that stands out to the audience.

A sample visualization where the text “75%” stands out, with “of users abandon our website on checkout” being included below.

This extra work can help do the heavy lifting for your audience, which is often why this work pays off.

However, there's one last thing to emphasize at the end.

Audiences don't read: they scan. Titles help to get that idea across.

Design storytelling requires the right words on the page

Why do we need to pay such close attention to the words in our presentation?

It's for a straightforward reason: Audiences don't read. They scan.

We often design websites with this core idea: why should our presentations be any different?

Part of telling a story through design is ensuring that our users (or audience) can follow where we intend to go. If we fail to do this, this often leads to workflow issues or user friction.

By applying that same detailed eye (and desire for ease of use) to your user research presentations, you can improve your presentations to become more engaging and persuasive.

While writing is not everything you need for design storytelling, ensuring you won't lose your audience within the first few slides is crucial.

Doing so can allow you to establish common ground and help your audiences understand the bigger picture around your user research.

Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer, Data-Informed Design Author, and Data and Design newsletter author . His new free book, The Resilient UX Professional , provides real-world advice to get your first UX job and advance your UX career.

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Ready for more?

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Princeton Correspondents on Undergraduate Research

How to Make a Successful Research Presentation

Turning a research paper into a visual presentation is difficult; there are pitfalls, and navigating the path to a brief, informative presentation takes time and practice. As a TA for  GEO/WRI 201: Methods in Data Analysis & Scientific Writing this past fall, I saw how this process works from an instructor’s standpoint. I’ve presented my own research before, but helping others present theirs taught me a bit more about the process. Here are some tips I learned that may help you with your next research presentation:

More is more

In general, your presentation will always benefit from more practice, more feedback, and more revision. By practicing in front of friends, you can get comfortable with presenting your work while receiving feedback. It is hard to know how to revise your presentation if you never practice. If you are presenting to a general audience, getting feedback from someone outside of your discipline is crucial. Terms and ideas that seem intuitive to you may be completely foreign to someone else, and your well-crafted presentation could fall flat.

Less is more

Limit the scope of your presentation, the number of slides, and the text on each slide. In my experience, text works well for organizing slides, orienting the audience to key terms, and annotating important figures–not for explaining complex ideas. Having fewer slides is usually better as well. In general, about one slide per minute of presentation is an appropriate budget. Too many slides is usually a sign that your topic is too broad.

user research presentation

Limit the scope of your presentation

Don’t present your paper. Presentations are usually around 10 min long. You will not have time to explain all of the research you did in a semester (or a year!) in such a short span of time. Instead, focus on the highlight(s). Identify a single compelling research question which your work addressed, and craft a succinct but complete narrative around it.

You will not have time to explain all of the research you did. Instead, focus on the highlights. Identify a single compelling research question which your work addressed, and craft a succinct but complete narrative around it.

Craft a compelling research narrative

After identifying the focused research question, walk your audience through your research as if it were a story. Presentations with strong narrative arcs are clear, captivating, and compelling.

  • Introduction (exposition — rising action)

Orient the audience and draw them in by demonstrating the relevance and importance of your research story with strong global motive. Provide them with the necessary vocabulary and background knowledge to understand the plot of your story. Introduce the key studies (characters) relevant in your story and build tension and conflict with scholarly and data motive. By the end of your introduction, your audience should clearly understand your research question and be dying to know how you resolve the tension built through motive.

user research presentation

  • Methods (rising action)

The methods section should transition smoothly and logically from the introduction. Beware of presenting your methods in a boring, arc-killing, ‘this is what I did.’ Focus on the details that set your story apart from the stories other people have already told. Keep the audience interested by clearly motivating your decisions based on your original research question or the tension built in your introduction.

  • Results (climax)

Less is usually more here. Only present results which are clearly related to the focused research question you are presenting. Make sure you explain the results clearly so that your audience understands what your research found. This is the peak of tension in your narrative arc, so don’t undercut it by quickly clicking through to your discussion.

  • Discussion (falling action)

By now your audience should be dying for a satisfying resolution. Here is where you contextualize your results and begin resolving the tension between past research. Be thorough. If you have too many conflicts left unresolved, or you don’t have enough time to present all of the resolutions, you probably need to further narrow the scope of your presentation.

  • Conclusion (denouement)

Return back to your initial research question and motive, resolving any final conflicts and tying up loose ends. Leave the audience with a clear resolution of your focus research question, and use unresolved tension to set up potential sequels (i.e. further research).

Use your medium to enhance the narrative

Visual presentations should be dominated by clear, intentional graphics. Subtle animation in key moments (usually during the results or discussion) can add drama to the narrative arc and make conflict resolutions more satisfying. You are narrating a story written in images, videos, cartoons, and graphs. While your paper is mostly text, with graphics to highlight crucial points, your slides should be the opposite. Adapting to the new medium may require you to create or acquire far more graphics than you included in your paper, but it is necessary to create an engaging presentation.

The most important thing you can do for your presentation is to practice and revise. Bother your friends, your roommates, TAs–anybody who will sit down and listen to your work. Beyond that, think about presentations you have found compelling and try to incorporate some of those elements into your own. Remember you want your work to be comprehensible; you aren’t creating experts in 10 minutes. Above all, try to stay passionate about what you did and why. You put the time in, so show your audience that it’s worth it.

For more insight into research presentations, check out these past PCUR posts written by Emma and Ellie .

— Alec Getraer, Natural Sciences Correspondent

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user research presentation

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

College of engineering, athena wins best presentation award for brain-inspired ai research.

Athena SQ.jpg

The research will advance the development of AI systems to meet increasing computational demands, while achieving more human-like cognitive capabilities with improved efficiency.

Ph.D. candidate Fabia Farlin Athena received the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory  (APL) Machine Learning Outstanding Oral Presentation Award.

She was recently notified of the award for her presentation, “Describing the Analog Resistance Change of HfOx Neuromorphic Synapses,” given at the Materials Research Society’s (MRS) Fall 2023 Meeting in Boston.

The research was recognized for its contributions to future materials and technologies toward sustainable heterogeneous computing and energy-efficient machine learning.

MRS brings together materials researchers from around the world to promote the sharing and communication of interdisciplinary research and technology to improve the quality of life.

Athena, an IBM Ph.D. Fellow, conducted the research with her advisor, Eric M. Vogel, a Hightower Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), with an adjunct appointment in School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

She presented a compact model, Compact Series Trap-Assisted Tunneling and Ohmic conduction (C-STAO), which enables the rapid simulation of artificial HfOx synaptic devices. The model provides deep insights into the analog temporal responses and temperature dependency of artificial synaptic devices, which are used to develop brain-inspired circuits.

These brain-inspired circuits are important for the development of AI systems and can help them to meet increasing computational demands while achieving more human-like cognitive capabilities with improved efficiency.

It also furthers Athena’s Ph.D. research, dedicated to the development of adaptive oxide devices for neuromorphic computing, aimed at replicating the human brain's functionality for more intelligent and energy-efficient computing.

Funding Acknowledgement

This project was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research MURI entitled, “Cross-disciplinary Electronic-ionic Research Enabling Biologically Realistic Autonomous Learning (CEREBRAL)” under Award No. FA9550-18-1-0024.

This work was performed in part at the Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation (No. ECCS-1542174). The work was also supported by the Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship and the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award No. 2022-2024.

Zachary Winiecki

[email protected]

COMMENTS

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