43.  How do I tell a good story in my readouts?

Drew Freeman: Welcome, Joe. How are you doing?

Joe Marantano: I am in the post vacation funk, Drew. I've been out for a few weeks. I was out for that conference and then a few weeks of actual vacation. Vacation. And as we're recording, today is my first day back at work.

Drew Freeman: I was going to say for you listening, it's only been a week since you heard from us, but for Joe and I, it's been like three weeks. Almost a month since we last talked on Mike.

Joe Marantano: I think this is the longest we've gone, since we met each other without having a discussion about ux.

Drew Freeman: Well, that sounds crazy and a little bit sappy. I like it.

Joe Marantano: Yeah.

Drew Freeman: All right, so let's get started. And since you just gave a great talk that I watched as you live, as you were giving it, we'renna have you give a little summary of your talk. So why don't you introduce us to the talk that you gave and kick us off.

Joe Marantano: Yeah. So I did a talk, at the UX Insight Festival, and it was titled what Can Researchers Learn from Detectives About Storytelling. And so I talked through kind of my three rules of storytelling, why they exist, how to use them, and how. The way I see it, it's not a research problem that we have, it's a storytelling problem, it's a presentation problem.

Drew Freeman: So I definitely want to unpack that because I think that point that research doesn't have a research problem is such a good point to talk about. But before we do that, I want toa take one step back. I know we've done a little minise series on it. Go back and listen to how to Interview Like a Detective if you haven't heard it. But Joe, give us your really quick overview of your past career.

Joe Marantano: Yeah. If you're new to the show or you don't know me, before I was a researcher, I was a police officer and a detective for a long time. I actually kind of parlayed that into years and years ago when UX was really hot and there weren't as many UX researchers out there as there are now. I was doing UX research projects on the side, freelancing, as I was still a detective. And it was a number of years ago that I decided to leave the police department entirely. And now as everybody listening knows, I do work full time in UX research.

Drew Freeman: Such unique, a unique career arc. It's really interesting and like I said, we've got a two part mini series on that's titled how to Interview Like a Detective. So go and go back and look for that if you're interested and haven't heard it yet.

Joe Marantano: Yeah, definitely. Check those out.

Drew Freeman: So Joe, you kind of your opening point to this talk. The hook that drew people in was UX research doesn't have a research problem. It has a presentation or a storytelling problem. Can you expand on that for me a little bit?

Joe Marantano: Yeah, yeah, that was the hook. That was the, the draw people in. And based on conversations I've had with other UXRs, including you, and my personal experiences, it's pretty rare that we run into quote, unquot bad research that's done by a researcher. The overwhelming majority of the time research is really good, it's exceptional. But so often we see presentations and decks and readouts done and nothing happens. And if the research isn't the problem, I think that the presentation is. I think that we need to do a better job of making our presentations more like stories, making them stickier.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, I think that makes total sense. I mean it's cliche, but if a tree falls in a forest and no one's around to hear it, does it actually make a sound? If no stakeholders took anything from the research, did the research actually happen?

Joe Marantano: Yeah. And when I've posted or talked about this on LinkedIn, before, I've gotten a little bit of pushback and what I kind of say is like, focus on your presentation. Your presentation is actually more important than your research. That's not to say that your research quality isn't important or isn't critical, but we've gone so long now with like having

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Joe Marantano: really good research that it's kind of like table stakes. It's like seatbelts in a car. You wouldn't buy a car without seatbets. But you don't really check for seatbets anymore because every car has seatbets.

Drew Freeman: Right. Doing good research is just the price of entry at this point. It's expected.

Joe Marantano: Yes.

Drew Freeman: It's the minimum at this point.

Joe Marantano: Yeah. And so we need to do a better job. You know, everyone talks about like, what's the impact of research? And these are like the common interview questions is what was the impact of your research? Well, your research won't have any impact if you're not presenting it in a way that the stakeholders walk away and say, I know what I'm going to do and I'm going to get this done next week or tomorrow or whatever.

Drew Freeman: Right. If the stakeholders don't walk away from your presentation or your readout or your report, and having been changed by the research that you did, all your research becomes is something sitting in a repository or on a shelf somewhere.

Joe Marantano: And as a good friend of mine says, repositories are where research goes to die.

Drew Freeman: Absolutely. So your talk was really built around the rules that you yourself use as you're putting together your presentations. What's rule number one?

Joe Marantano: So rule number one is to keep it clean. And the way I explain this in the talk is the more information you have, the less influence you will have. So the more you give, the more you present, the less influence you will have. And it's a little counterintuitive and something.

Drew Freeman: That I can already hear folks typ in comments and maybe disagreeing with. So I guess the way that I think of it, or at least a way that is maybe easier to understand and that can get people to kind of get halfway to your point and then you can take them the rest of the way, is that the more pieces of information you throw out there, the less impact each one can have individually. There's only like, a. There's a finite amount of impact that your research can have. And if you're peppering in so many different pieces, each one becomes a little bit less valuable.

Joe Marantano: Yeah, I used a kind of a demonstrative trick in the talk. that doesn't really work in podcast form, but the way I would describe it to folks is like, imagine a forest and then imagine a single tree. You will get much more detail. You will understand what you're looking at if you're looking at a picture of a single tree versus if I show you the entire forest. But really the point of the presentation is we need to act on, like, what's going on with this one tree. All I've done is distract and provide off ramps for people's attention. Focus on your entire story. Your entire presentation needs to be built around driving the 1, 2, 3 pieces of recommendations you made, the handful of action you want to drive.

Drew Freeman: And I think that makes a lot of sense, but I think a number of people can really struggle with. But I did all this good work, and won't it go to waste if I don't present it? What's your response for them?

Joe Marantano: So a few things. Number One, just because you do a readout about solely based on your research questions does not mean that you can't two months later say, hey, I put this together based on a trend I saw across several studies. And I, want you all to have a look at this. If you are at an organization that is appropriately using a research repository, putting those things in the appendix means they're discoverable and means that they could have value later. It is frustrating to do lots and lots of work for smaller nuggets, for smaller things, for a more narrow focus. But if you do that, then you actually have impact and you won't have instances where I did all that work and nothing happened.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so then my other question that I want you to kind of expand upon is how do you, how do you pare down all of the insights that you have and really hone in on and determine which are the ones to focus on?

Joe Marantano: I, go back to the research questions. It's always about, is this answering a research question? Is this related to directly a research question? Now that does not. You got to use your judgment here. That does not mean that if you discover a different existential threat, you ignore it or you don't present on it. Maybe that means you have to pivot and that is now your revised research question. But at the end of the day,

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Joe Marantano: what are the couple of things that directly answer the research questions?

Drew Freeman: This podcast will continue to sound like a broken record when it comes to us saying you have to take it back to the research question. We're gonna say that so many times.

Joe Marantano: It really does. It's that and it depends are like the two mantras of this podcast.

Drew Freeman: Very true, very true. Okay, so then what is rule number two?

Joe Marantano: Rule number two is to keep it simple. The stakeholders do not speak research. Stakeholders speak English. the story that I used in the talk to demonstrate this was about a time I took my car to the mechanic. And you know, I'm not a supercar guy. I have a high level understanding of how cars work. Bring my car into the mechanic, he puts it up on the thing, and then he comes out and says, your car has a bad 02 sensor. It's sending the incorrect voltage to the car ZCU. And this leads to inconsistent combustion. I have no idea what that means, and I am too proud to ask what that means because I don't speak mechanic. If you go on a five minute tangent about the P value in your survey, some of your stakeholders might get that. But A lot of them won't. So div in, don't use this heavy $10 word research terminology when you don't have to.

Drew Freeman: So what is your stakeholder? Speak English translation for what your car guy said.

Joe Marantano: What my mechanic should have said to me is, you got a bad Sensor, it'll cost $200 to fix and I'll have you out of there in 30 minutes. Because those were the three pieces of information I cared about. That's all I needed to make a decision.

Drew Freeman: Okay, so translating that to our job as UX researchers, that means you're going to have to understand the goals and the needs and the kind of emotional place that your stakeholders are in. You're going to have to understand how they process information. You're gonna have to understand what they need to be able to make the case to their stakeholders. So you're going to have to research your stakeholders.

Joe Marantano: Yeah. And the caveat that I kind of throw out with this is if you know you have a stakeholder that's going to ask about your P value, that doesn't mean don't include it, then know your stakeholders, know your audience. That kind of trumps everything. But by and large, your stakeholders frankly don't care about the minutiae of the research. They want to know what to do with what you found out.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, they don't care, why we crafted this survey question in this way instead of that way. They care what information that survey gave us.

Joe Marantano: Yeah, I think that a lot of times we think about presenting research findings as if we were the audience or as if the audience was another researcher. And we have to remember that we are not the audience. A readout, a non researcher is a stakeholder is all right.

Drew Freeman: And what's rule number three?

Joe Marantano: So the final rule is to keep it tailored, keep it tailored to your audience.

Drew Freeman: And I maybe stepped on this one a little bit. Talking about, you know, you're going to have to research your stakeholders.

Joe Marantano: No, and I think you, you brought it up at the right point. The crux of kind of what I'm going with this is there's a lot of ways to do a readout. And I'll use the term read out loosely there. You could make a deck, you could lead a 30 minute workshop, you could write a one pager, you could put together a three minute loom video of you talking through the findings. And even through those methods, there's different variations. I could make a presentation that's really heavy on video clips. I could make a presentation that's really heavy on kind of the numbers and charts and graphs, I want to make sure that I am presenting in a format that works best for my audience. But also the actual information is what hooks them, what pulls them in, what makes the material sticky for them.

Drew Freeman: And how do you recommend to. To maybe newer researchers or researchers who feel like they're struggling with this? Where do you recommend starting?

Joe Marantano: So there are kind of three ways to get the appropriate format down. And the first is you could guess, you could trial and error it. The second way is you could talk to your coworkers, talk to your team members, even if they're not researchers, even if they're designers, they've been in presentations with these stakeholders before. They've presented to these stakeholders. They know that when you know, pm, Bob Smith is attending a presentation and a video

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Joe Marantano: clip gets shown, he immediately goes to slack. So now you know that when Bob is one of my stakeholders, I'm not going to put any video clips in there because that's when I lose Bob. They know that Jane Doe loves numbers, and that's what draws her in. And so I'm going to put a chart in there. That slide, that chart is specifically targeted at her to draw her in. And then the third way is you could have these conversations with your stakeholders, talk to them, find out, hey, do you want to do a workshop when we're done with this? Do you want me to just give you a one pager? What's the way that makes this most digestible for you? What do you care about the most?

Drew Freeman: And it might sound like that third way is kind of cheating or putting the work onto your stakeholders. But that's just efficient communication and efficient research. I mean, when we're doing research on users, we don't go talk to other people who aren't the users. We talk to the actual users.

Joe Marantano: Yeah, you know, one of the analogies I used in the talk was like, I really like to read books, and I like to read the physical book. But a physical book could also be an ebook. It could be an audiobook, it could be a movie that you watch in a theater. It could be a movie you stream at home. Maybe it's even a story that's like a theatrical production. That's six different ways to take in the same story. If my fiance brought me an ebook or an audiobook, that's, you know, I'm a reader, I like to hold the physical book. I would much rather she had that conversation with me. She knows now, but, like, when we first started dating, how do you like to read to books so that when she gifts me a book, she gives it to me in the format that I amnna take in the story best.

Drew Freeman: Right. Not everyone takes in information the same. And it's part of our job as researchers, as presenters, as storytellers, to give people the information that they need in the way that is most digestible for them.

Joe Marantano: Absolutely.

Drew Freeman: All right, so I know part of your talk at the end, there was audience participation in the form of a Q and A. And there were some really good questions. Are there any that you want to kind of summarize here?

Joe Marantano: There were two or three that I thought really stood out. And one was about, you know, like, these rules are great and all, but, like, what's the thing that really makes a story sticky? And when I did this talk, I had kind of a format I followed. I did the rule, I gave an analogy, and then I told a story from my life about that rule. And then I moved on to the next rule. When you pair in a short story or an analogy, that's the thing that becomes sticky. So, you know, it's been several weeks now since I gave this talk. I guarantee that half of the people do not remember the rules.

Drew Freeman: I would say it's probably more than that.

Joe Marantano: It might be more. But I would bet that most of them remember the stories or the analogies. So they may not remember the actual rule, but they remember the lesson because they remember the story. They remember the analogy. So whenever you can use analogies, use stories. You know, if you know your stakeholders and you yourself are all into hockey or movies or whatever, use an analogy from that shared interest to really make these things stick.

Drew Freeman: I mean, stories are, in a lot of ways, the language of humans. I mean, stories have been passed down essentially ever since we evolved the ability to speak.

Joe Marantano: You know, the invention of writing or the discovery of the written word is a lot more recent than most people think. When you look at, like, the arc of human history, before anything was written down, that was the only way things were passed on. That's what sustained thousands of cultures for hundreds of thousands of years, was people sitting around telling each other stories.

Drew Freeman: Absolutely. Its stories are incredibly memorable, especially when they're paired with it. And coming from a good storyteller and, we all have the opportunity to be really good storytellers, I think that's.

Joe Marantano: The way that we have impact. That's the way we drive whatever it is that we're trying to do, whatever it is we're trying to change.

Drew Freeman: All right, so I think there was One more question that you wanted, to cover.

Joe Marantano: Yeah. And, I'll hit

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Joe Marantano: one super byte size, and then I'll hit a question. And the one super byte size is the thing that I talk about. The formats that I use. Those are not the way to do things. Those are a way to do things. There's lots of correct ways to tell a story. So like everything else we talk about in this podcast, this is not the tool in your tool chest. This is another tool to add your tool chest. The other question I got, especially when it comes to keeping it simple, is how do you know when it's too simple? How do you know when you've gone too far in the other direction? Because we don't want to undersell research to the point where people think that anyone can do what we do. There's training and there'skill and hard work that you all and Drew and I have put in to become good researchers. And the answer that I gave is that I rely on my team. I rely on other researchers. And Drew, you know this because you were part of the group, but I did a dry run with my talk to ensure that, like, in my talk about breaking things down and keeping it simple, I wasn't going too far. I wanted to make sure that I kind of found that sweet spot. And so my answer there is to rely on your team.

Drew Freeman: Mm Yeah, Absolutely. This is potentially an apocryphal quote from Albert Einstein, but I do really like it. He potentially said it's not actually on record, but it's often attributed to him. He's saying he said everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. And yes, I love that. Yeah, it. It is challenging to know where that line is, but that is the magic. That is the beauty of it.

Joe Marantano: yeah. And it very much resonates with the rules and the talk that I gave.

Drew Freeman: All right, so a question from me, Drew. What did you kind of learn or what did you get inspired by in some of the networking conversations that I'm sure you had while you were there?

Joe Marantano: That was a blast. And a lot of that was just like, giving me an opportunity. I had not been to the Netherlands before, and then the conference was populated by folks all over Europe. So a lot of that was just getting a chance to meet folks from all over Europe, which was very cool. The thing that I took away and the thing that I loved that when I saw this talk, it was like this eye opening moment. It was on the same day as my talk. It was actually the last one. Before lunch. And it was a talk given by Dave Ora, and Lisa Kan. And they were talking about what are some ways we can visualize the data we get from interviews? Because this was something that was important to them. And what they realized is that if you were to visualize the data from an interview, it's like an ant colony. It all starts in the same place. And while you have these different chambers that represent different topics and every ant colony has these different chambers. They're in slightly different spots and they become a little deeper in some spots and the path to these chambers meander.

Drew Freeman: It's not the same and it's never straight.

Joe Marantano: Yeah. And I'm probably not doing their talk justice here, but this to me was one of the most eye opening things. It gave me whole new ideas on how to analyze my data.

Drew Freeman: And I think from how to analyze it, you can also take that approach to how do I communicate and come back to tell stories about it.

Joe Marantano: Exactly.

Drew Freeman: All right, well, I think that's a really awesome place to end. I thought you did a really great job at the, at the conference. I'm proud of you, buddy.

Joe Marantano: Thank you. I appreciate it. It was a little nerve wracking. You know, it was the first time talking live at a conference, but it was a lot of fun. I'm glad I did it.

Drew Freeman: And hopefully we'll be at other conferences in the future maybe and maybe we can meet some of you.

Joe Marantano: Yeah, I know that we picked up a bunch of listeners, who saw me there and I'd love to see you at the next one.

Drew Freeman: All right, so thank you everybody for joining us and for listening today. Please give us a like a subscribe a review on whatever platform you're listening to us on. That really helps folks, new folks find us and we really appreciate it. If you have questions that you would like to hear us talk about. And spoiler, next week's is going to be a question from a listener. You can send those to us at inside uxrmail.com. if you'd like to more directly support the show, there's a link where you can do that in the show notes with that. I'm Drew Freeman. I'm Joe Markantano

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Drew Freeman: and we'll see you next time.

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