Making research more memorable with sticky insights
September 2019
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2 min read
stick·y — /ˈstikē/ (Google Dictionary)
adjective: tending or designed to stick to things on contact
noun: (in an online forum) a thread containing important information that is set to remain at the top of the other threads
The best insights are the ones that stick—the ones that stakeholders remember, the ones that shape product and business decisions. As researchers, we need to present insights in ways that are engaging and compelling for our audience. Unfortunately, fast-moving teams can often overlook research communicated through slide decks and documents.
Early in his design research career, Prabhas Pokharel , co-founder of Reduct.Video, realized that the insights he shared through video stuck in his colleagues’ minds better than those he summarized in reports. Concise, pithy, emotive videos direct from the field created empathy and sparked discussions.
Yet for many of us, traditional video editing software is intimidating. Who wants to learn another sprawling software suite with steep learning curves? Who can afford to lose days creating video deliverables when our teams need findings yesterday?
But what if video were simpler, easier, and faster to produce? At Reduct , we do just that—make it easy for researchers to turn video into insights at unprecedented speed, enabling anyone in the organization to connect to the customer and create sticky insights. Got 5 minutes? Great, you’ve just learned how to Reduct.
At Thumbtack, a platform that enables customers to locate and hire small businesses, Senior Experience Researcher Jordan Berry incorporates video and audio clips made in Reduct into her company “All Thumbs” presentations. Jordan and her team found that this approach “increases the stickiness” of their presentations, with product managers and engineers discussing what they heard afterward in company common areas. “It takes them along for the ride by […] letting them be involved in that story.”
Presenting research video and audio to a wide audience beyond the product team—for example, support, product operations, finance, policy—has generated significant interest in the research itself, as well as their research team. Jordan notes that video and audio brings “research to an audience that may otherwise have missed what we're working on and what our customers are saying.”
As a design research and strategy consultant, Amy Santee created video highlight reels in Reduct that she wove into her client presentation. As a result, she was able to fully engage executives for 90 minutes in what she called the best presentation of her career. “People were very engaged. I saw very little of the boredom: looking-at-computers, looking-at-phones, glazed over kind of look that’s typical.”
Good research deserves to stick around. With Reduct, insights will become more memorable for your research partners.
