Whilst the structure and inner content of an insight is critical, the more practical means by which you share knowledge across teams may have a larger contributing factor to its overall impact than is perhaps immediately obvious.
Insights provide teams with the ability to make well informed and timely decisions that drive a business forward. As Oli Mival, Head of Research & Insight at PicsArt puts it:
“As researchers, we’re here to help de-risk decisions. Product moves at pace and it’s about understanding what are the most risky decisions that we’re making, and what are the consequences of getting it wrong.”
Oli Mival
So whether you’re sharing insights within a team or across a wider organisation, it’s important to ensure that it lands in the consciousness of the people that need it, otherwise, as Oli puts it, “it’s meaningless”. After all, you may have discovered a potentially game-changing, strategy defining insight - but if it doesn't reach the decision maker, was it ever an insight at all?
And while there's an abundance of helpful articles out there that tackle important considerations surrounding the structuring and inner content of an insight itself (several of these are linked in the further reading section below), we found very few resources that look specifically at the practical considerations for distributing insights across teams.
How can you ensure that when sharing insights, they’re:
- Frictionlessly accessible
- Secure & revocable
- Effectively formatted
- Channel optimised
- Measurable
This post aims to break down the above considerations and provide food for thought when distributing insights across your organisation.
By ‘frictionless’, we mean: from the moment an insight is discovered, how quickly can it land in the consciousness of the decision maker, with the least barriers to getting there?
Often the most frictionless way to share an insight outside of your immediate team is via a link. From the perspective of distribution, you should be able to quickly and easily package up an insight, generate a secure link, and share this with the recipient.
Further, the link should provide quick access to your recipient once they’ve engaged with it. It’s important that an insight is accessible on any device or browser, and crucially - doesn’t require them to have an existing account with whichever tool you used to share it. Consider this a funnel, any steps to accessing an insight are barriers that can create a ‘leak’ or ‘drop off’. Too many barriers lower the chances of shared insights being read.
As researchers, we often share sensitive information - be that about our organisation, or perhaps the participants involved in the study. Being able to securely share a link is possibly the most critical consideration when it comes to sharing insights. You need to be safe in the knowledge that the data is (and will remain), secure.
First and foremost, insights need to be packaged up on a secure platform. After all, the information you’re sharing may well form part of your organisation's intellectual property, and could be harmful or damaging if it entered public domain.
The often overlooked challenge with sharing even the most secure link is that it will typically continue to be accessible once created and shared. In some instances, the insight you shared might expire or be disproven, or you might be contractually obligated to remove information about participants after a certain period of time. No one wants to go back to a stakeholder and ask them to delete the link that they were previously sent.
It’s therefore important to share links using tools that allow you to revoke access to that information and disable the link altogether - without necessarily needing to delete a record of the insight itself.
Some systems allow users to manage multiple share links for the same source content. This allows users to manage access and passwords to links that have been previously sent, whilst keeping uninterrupted access open to others. A bonus byproduct of this capability is that it is also possible to see a breakdown of engagement metrics e.g. number of views, per individual link.
Insights should be shared in a format that is consistent, impactful and engaging. Since no organisation is the same, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution to packaging up insights.
Our research indicates that getting stakeholders to engage with research is one of the biggest challenges researchers face today. It’s not difficult to understand why this might be the case given that insights are often shared via email, Slack messages, sheets, docs and wikis.
Imagine opening an email or clicking on a link to some research you’ve been shared. You likely have an immediate, emotional reaction to it. Instinctively you know whether you like it or not, yet it’s not necessarily easy to verbalise. Visual design principles help us make sense of visual compositions. Basic principles of design include:
In design, this is often referred to as "white space," or the area between elements.
The importance of elements in respect to others.
How different elements can create a more cohesive composition and provide sufficient contrast to ensure they’re accessible to as many people as possible.
The relationship between the size of different elements.
Using consistent elements, spacing, fonts etc.
While these principles were developed for visual design, applying design principles that build from these core ideas helps your insight create impact and engagement.
Whilst it’s entirely plausible to create visually impactful insights using presentation software, wikis, email etc, using the design principles above, it can be time consuming - particularly in tools that are not primarily intended for this purpose. And because we cannot expect researchers to have the skills of trained designers, it’s no wonder that insights are often shared in a less than desirable format.
Tools such as Invision Boards, Beautiful.ai and Dualo’s Insight Builder are purposefully designed to take the required skill away from design to meet these principles. They work by limiting the formatting options available - ensuring that you can quickly generate impactful work that meets design standards without the need for design skills.
Further, in recent years, many teams have adopted a one-pager approach for packaging up and distributing insights. This powerful storytelling format encourages succinct articulation through a combination of words and visuals, and is particularly effective at engaging stakeholders.
Most organisations will have several distribution methods that they use for company-wide communication. The most common are chat tools (such as Slack or Teams), and email.
It’s important to ensure that however you package up and format your insights, they work well with the channels your organisation already uses. The very best tools are optimised for these channels. For example, share links posted in Slack that have been generated in Figma and Dualo automatically pull through the source of the link, the title of the file and provide a preview of what’s inside.
One frustration we hear time and time again at Dualo is that researchers are unsure if the research they shared with wider teams and stakeholders had reached its intended destination. Many were completely in the dark as to how much impact the insights they’d shared had ultimately achieved.
Did the recipient view the link they’d sent? Did they forward the link to anyone else? How can you be sure of the impact that the research you're sharing is having if you don't know who's interacting with it?
If these are questions that you find yourself or your teammates asking, then a further consideration when choosing a platform to share your insights via is: does it allow me to track whether the link has been viewed or forwarded?
As Katarina Bagherian, VP of UX at Adyen puts it “the insight-sharing phase of research often receives the least focus, time, and attention in the process”. Whilst Katarina was more explicitly commenting on the insight itself, it’s fair to say that the practical aspects to sharing insights are also often overlooked.
Ensuring that the insights you share with teammates and stakeholders have the least amount of barriers to view them, are secure and revocable, formatted and designed for maximum impact, channel optimised, and data backed, are critical to maximise the effectiveness of your research.
The ability to effectively distribute research and insights across an organisation is 1 of the 3 core jobs that an insights repository needs to be able to facilitate (alongside the ability to consolidate and discover), in order to achieve user research excellence.
We hope this post provides some food for thought when sharing insights across your organisation. Ultimately, the more practical means by which you share knowledge may have a larger contributing factor to its overall impact than is perhaps immediately obvious.
A guide to sharing insights in ways that stick
How to structure product insights to maximise value and impact
The Power of Insights: A behind-the-scenes look at the new insights platform at Uber
How to write an executive summary people will read
What is user research excellence and is it achievable by any team?
Dualo is an insights hub used by digital product teams to get more repeatable value from their user research and insights, so that stakeholders can make informed and timely decisions across the organisation. If you're interested in learning more, please request a demo and a member of our team will be in touch.
I’m a design, UX & strategy lead with a passion for storytelling. Proud member of Dualo’s founding product trio. Always seeking new inspiration.
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