UX designers practice the art of sharing product information with users in a way that is understandable, useful, and compelling.
When it comes to sharing insights from user research with your team members and stakeholders, the same goals hold true. As researchers, we can think of our research insights as our “product” and stakeholders as our “users.” Just like product users, stakeholders such as engineers, project managers, and leadership need a great experience when consuming research insights—or else we risk them misunderstanding or losing interest.
Developing personas to efficiently and effectively deliver insights to stakeholders
Designing personas is a UX technique for creating a portrait of users’ preferences, needs, and wants. By doing this work upfront, researchers can incorporate personas into the process of sharing all research, thus reducing the time it takes for both researchers and stakeholders to extract and consume insights. You increase the likelihood that your stakeholders will engage with your insights when you share information that is relevant and personalized to their needs.
To build out these personas, you can conduct formal interviews with your team or build them out based on your existing knowledge. You can also use some of these insights, such as specific pain points your stakeholders are curious about, to compile a list of tags to use when analyzing your insights (developing tag lists in advance is a key feature of the Tetra platform). By identifying these tags early in the process, you won’t have to sift through your research to answer stakeholders’ questions later.
Helpful Questions to Ask in Building Stakeholder Personas
- What are their goals for the product?
- What motivates them in their current roles?
- How do they measure success?
- What decisions do they have power over?
- What are their backgrounds?
- What skills do they possess?
- What are their goals for the research? What do they need to know or gain?
- What part of the research are they most interested in?
- What are their concerns or worries about the research?
- What format would they prefer to receive information (powerpoint, video files, folder, word doc)
- Do they have easy access to the research repository?
- Will they be sharing this information? With who and in what context? What might those people need to know and what resources might you stakeholder need to tell that story?
- How much time do they have to spend on research?
- At what frequency would they like to get updates on the progress of research and/or the discovery of insights?
An Example Stakeholder Persona for a Product Owner
Jane
Role: Product owner
Jane’s goal is to increase adoption of the product by 25% this year. She is a great communicator and collaborator and prefers to have in-person meetings and brainstorming sessions to share information. She has a background in visual arts and appreciates beautiful graphs and visuals. With this research project, she is hoping to learn how to overcome the dropoff rate at registration. She would like actionable takeaways that her team can implement and test quickly to solve this problem. She is slightly worried that the participants used for testing might not match her actual users, so she has some distrust in the research. She would like to receive media files or slides from the research to put into her own presentations to explain design decisions to her bosses. She has about one hour a week to spend reviewing research and would like monthly updates.
With this persona, we might tailor the research presented to Jane so that it includes actionable takeaways, visuals and graphs, and resources she can share with her bosses. We will likely want to include information on the participants and how they match the users to overcome her distrust of the research. We will want to test alternatives to the current registration process and provide Jane with qualitative insights on the likely success rate of the alternatives. And, we can tailor the information sent to her so that it is digestible in the amount of time she has.
Keep in mind, this information is to help you get to know your stakeholders, but it doesn’t automatically create buy-in. For example, if Jane tells us she only has one hour a week for research, but we think it requires more time, one of our goals with the way we communicate insights will be to convey the value of the research.
Ensuring Your Insights Resonate with Stakeholders
By deeply understanding the needs of your stakeholder personas, you will know exactly how to present your findings for each project, thus saving time for both your research team and your stakeholders. By tailoring your insights to each persona, you ensure they are relevant, actionable, and valuable.
If your team is looking to level up its research, Tetra can help! Whether you need a hand with a specific project or want guidance on optimizing your research process and sprints, our experts can guide you through our top strategies and best practices. Contact us to learn more about our research solutions.
