3 Points to Successful User Insight Storytelling 🤟

The "Open-faced Sandwich" feedback method

After lots of presentation monkeying in our time (PowerPoint, Google slides, Keynote, etc.), we've come to employ some practical lessons to our communication strategy. As much as possible, we like to adhere to a common arc in our User Insight Storytelling to ensure that the main points come across. This story arc is the crux of our focus here. We'll refer to it as our modified "sandwich feedback" 🥪 mechanism.

Sandwich feedback usually refers to somebody giving constructive feedback to someone else. At the workplace, this is commonplace. We've taken some aspects of sandwich feedback, and altered others, to make it a repeatable framework we us in our presentations. Instead of the pattern: praise → criticism → praise as seen in typical sandwich feedback, we've tweaked it to: positive appreciation → opportunities to improve → recommendations for how to solve.

As we write this, perhaps we'll refer to it as the Open-faced Sandwich (OFS) feedback method 😜.

1. Build momentum by highlighting value and appreciation

When communicating user feedback from UX research, you've got to consider your audience. The mindset of your stakeholders are key the user insights being adopted, or placed on the metaphorical shelf... forever 📚. Believe us. We've seen both first-hand, and know the feeling all too well.

Often times, we're talking about sensitive stuff. Many individuals on the call / meeting / workshop (whatever) have put in a lot of work and effort to make the user experience what it is. Time, energy, money and more have been spent to create this UX in question. We know it's not perfect. That's why UXR has been conducted. We're here to find opportunities to improve. But don't start there! You gotta warm up the audience.

The traditional sandwich method starts with praise. This is for good reason. People handle constructive criticism much better, after you've taken a moment to discuss what you value or appreciate about them. This is no different. You need to take a little bit of time (not too much) upfront to share what you've learned that builds positive momentum. Without it, your opportunities and recommendations are bound to fall flat.

Start with the positives in your presentation. Build momentum by sharing what's already appreciated or valued.

Momentarily curb your need to solve, and cater to the emotions of others. You're a competent UX Researcher; therefore, you must have a good empathy muscle ❤️. Use it here as well.

Tell your hard-working stakeholders something positive first. What does the user value most? What aspects do they appreciate already? Remember, you can then use these to set up opportunities as well. Your first few opportunities might look something like, "Do more of what's working well", "Add more features like these", etc.

As seen in the TL;DR example above, our first two insights of the presentation deck were focused on sharing what users valued: they comprehended the new business page onboarding, and they were receptive to even more guidance. Not shown is how we then broke those down into opportunities anyway, and provided supporting recommendations as fast-follows in the deck. We didn't spend an inordinate amount of time back-patting, but we gave an initial nod to the positive appreciation. Try it next time in your work.

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2. Spend time to outline user experience opportunities

OK, we've got the stakeholders on our side. They're listening. And you haven't burned too many minutes (just a few). Now's the moment to get into the meat of the presentation. Time to really dig into the user experience opportunities with supporting details and evidence.

In our example deck, following the TL;DR slide and 2 slides sharing the positive appreciation, you would find 3 more slides outlining critical opportunities for which to solve. Shown below is a slide focused on "Users prefer statements with clear benefits". These slides get us into the heavy-lifting 💪 part of the opportunities section.

Outline UX opportunities with clear details and a common structure for each slide.

When possible, we utilize a common structure on each slide to convey the details. A succinct title describes the Insight Theme in a nutshell. A highlight video provides clear evidence. The quoted verbatim summarizes the best parts in words. A User Story makes it as easy as copy and paste into the agile development process. And the 'How might we...' statement sets up our UX recommendations on following slides, and/or any future ideation sessions.

We can't stress the documented supporting details for the opportunity slides enough. Whenever possible, please leverage the power of video in User Insight Storytelling 🎥. It puts the voice back in the that of the user. By this point, everyone's kind of tired of listening to you as the UX researcher, and would appreciate an interlude from the user themselves. Video helps the team build empathy for the user perspective. Audio clips, photos, or just the quoted verbatim work well enough when video highlights are not available. However, 30–120 second video clips are best 👍.

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3. End with specific recommendations and clear actions

So, what? That's what your product manager is thinking. If a UX researcher's job is to ask 'Why?' 5 times, then PMs exist to ask 'So, what?' at least 3. Detailing specific recommendations gives them the answers they seek.

In our example, we broke out separate slides for the specific recommendations. Sometimes, they exist in shorthand on the opportunity slide itself. Other times, we might omit recommendations altogether, because the team isn't ready for them. And a fourth option is to have a deck with only recommendations for the team that has to move really fast and hasn't got time for stories.

Example of a straightforward break-out slide with specific recommendations to solve for the UX opportunity.

Ideally, you can spend a few minutes after each opportunity slide to dig into specific recommendations to improve. The stakeholders are listening, understanding, and ready to hear what actions to take in order to solve the UX.

Notice how each recommendation begins with a verb.

Action-oriented verbs are necessary to clarify and direct exactly what's needed 🎬. "Add [X]...", "Change [Y]...", "Remove [Z]...", etc. Generally, the more tactical recommendations for UI get the very straightforward language, because there isn't much question about them. While the more strategic recommendations leverage phrases such as: "Consider...", "Explore...", etc. This leaves more room for ideation, solutioning, and exploring further as a team.

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The importance of summarizing opportunities and recommendations

We've now covered the main 3 points of the feedback method. Appreciate, outline opportunities, and make recommendations. In the this final stage, we must formulate the book-ends of your presentation.

To aid in the digestion by our stakeholders, we've got to boil everything down one step further ♨️. That means we need to summarize all opportunities, and prioritize all recommendations into one slide each.

The summary of the appreciation and opportunities will go upfront. We call it the TL;DR slide (too long; didn't read). You can see an example of our TL;DR slide (green) earlier in this article. Notice how we've written the appreciation points into an introductory sentence format, and then bulleted our list of UX opportunities. We've found this structure to be simple and work well.

As for recommendations, it's time to scrape them out and figure how to get them onto one slide. That usually means we need to prioritize the recommendations using some spectrum of analysis. Whether that's by ease of implementation, tactical vs. strategic, expected impact, cost-savings ability, cost to implement, or other. It will depend on your project at hand. We've moved from What? ➡ So, what? ➡ Now, what?

Prioritize the recommendations using some spectrum of analysis. Example shows by feature type, and tactical vs. strategic.

In our recommendations example, the method we used to prioritize was by feature type, combined with a level of tactical vs. strategic. The recommendations tended towards feature-based and tactical in the upper left, and more strategic and broad-based on the right and bottom.

If you're interested in learning more ways to create prioritized recommendations based on user research, see our article that breaks all this down even further. Especially, our favorite method, 'Must have', 'Need-to-have' and 'Nice-to-have', in addition to all the ways aforementioned.

Our absolutely final note... After all this is said and done, you have one last element to add in the TL;DR slide. We commonly write a statement, "If you only did one thing..." ☝️ and put it in the notes section of the first slide. This summarizes the entire project into 1-line statement of what the team should do, if they only had the time or ability to implement one thing. We might speak to it, or just keep it in our back pocket. But we like to have it. The process of drafting this out helps to crystalize our perspective on what's absolutely most important to convey throughout the presentation. That's it!

Good luck and Godspeed.

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