User experience (UX) research is made to define the problem that a service or a certain product needs to solve and find ways to do just that. Doing research is the first step to optimizing the user experience for your project.

People carry out this research through interviews, focus groups, surveys, reports, and data analysis. With these reports, researchers can present their work to stakeholders in a business, such as developers, designers, and executives.

With this article, you will be able to know everything that needs to be included in a UX research report, how to make your own, and some templates that you can use to guide you through the process.

There are several key elements that form a strong UX research project, and many other things to consider at the time of writing it down.

Determine Your Audience

Conduct some stakeholder interviews when you are planning your research. With those interviews, you will be able to obtain what they expect from your presentation.

You should tailor the report to the most relevant findings, how they might affect their work, and how they would receive information. Include data they will care about the most in a way that will be easy to understand. Keep the terminology simple.

Executives will want to know how all of this affects the company. At the same time, developers will ask about the technological changes they need to make based on your report.

Write a Brief Summary

Be as brief as possible. Summarise business value, your research goals, and the methodology implemented. Share the research plan stating its what, why, and how. 

You can explain your methods to new participants, conduct some interviews and analyze results. You will be fine if your summary answers the following questions:

• What were your research questions, and what was your hypothesis
• To which business decision will your research assist with
• What was the methodology used

If you want to go more in-depth and detail, you can link to surveys, interview plans, prototypes, and other things you might find necessary to add to the report. 

Show Your Research Findings in a Simple Way

Stakeholders are always in a hurry and won't have time to check and analyze raw information from your report. They need nothing more than relevant data, and that's why you have to present UX research findings with just your key insights. 

Summarise a few key elements at the beginning of the report, as the first thing they might want to see is the Atomic Research Nuggets. This means you must create condensed, high-priority bullet points that will attract attention immediately. 

People can reference them quickly and uncover insights by sharing relevant data. Those data could be recurring trends and themes, data visualization (like charts and graphs), and using relevant quotes to illustrate important findings. Other relevant aspects that you can share to keep illustrating your report are:

• Quotes from interviews
• Personas
• Affinity diagrams
• Prototypes
• User journey maps
• Storyboards

Most people will be alright with just having your key insights. But for those that might want to dig deeper into details, you can link to a searchable repository and include tagged data and artifacts for them to reference.

Share Key Insights

Provide actionable recommendations, not opinions. Share the next steps to take to solve pain points and answer pending decisions. You can suggest future research options too. And share direct quotes from users that made specific recommendations.

Choose The Best Format

A presentation is the best way to share data with a large group and when doing it with non-technical audiences or stakeholders. Those presentations should be used for visual communication and when you have to include relevant information in a brief summary. If you are dealing with a large group of people, you can present it as:

• A Slide deck
• Case Studies
• Atomic Research Nuggets
• Or a pre-recorded video

But suppose you are dealing with a smaller group of people, other researchers, or technical stakeholders. In that case, you may want to use a report rather than a presentation. This gives you a chance to create a comprehensive record.

A report can be categorized based on its purpose as analytics, usability, or market research. These reports are usually formatted as follows:

• A PDF document
• An Email
• A Slack update
• Or a Confluence or Notion page

Our best advice is to write the report first and then prepare a presentation. After making the presentation, you can share a report that has more details.

We will share with you some of the best recommendations on the making of qualitative research and a few ways that you can improve your report.

Explain the Process and Keep It Concise

Some co-workers might forget what’s behind the process after weeks or months of research. You should explain the phases of research and planning you went through, including the purpose of each one. 

This will help your user research team members answer their questions and reduce friction. You can link to deliverables from the different phases of the process. All of this should be done engagingly.

If you don't want to rely solely on making questions, try including alternative formats like audio clips, videos, high-fidelity prototypes, or visualizations. Anything interactive will help with engagement during or after the presentation. 

Some UX researchers might even tell a story throughout the presentation, using the "Hero's Journey" as structure. Explain why you conducted research, go further with your findings, and zoom out to your insights, summary, and recommendations.

Combine Data and Make it Actionable

Try to use qualitative data to back up your quantitative data. This can be, for example, including visualization of poll results with a direct quote talking about that pain point.

Show the value of your work and build empathy for your users. Then, translate your findings into a format that stakeholders will be able to understand and act upon.

An actionable presentation will have some business value. They are engaging and need to solve a problem or reach a solution. These could be finding out more about the market, analyzing user data, or optimizing usability.

There are a few ways to make your presentation actionable:

• Share your deck and repository files for reference
• Include a to-do list at the end
• Share some answers to posed research questions
• Recommend solutions for product and business decisions
• Suggest what kind of research should be done next

Get the Team Involved

Involve the rest of the user research team, so everyone is aligned with the plan. Let them know that everyone will be brainstorming solutions at the end, and they will be engaged while you present.

Talk through ideas as a group to notice some patterns and vote for the best ones that come through. Your team will feel good about their contributions, and you will leave with collaborative and solid ideas.

Admit Any Possible Shortcoming

Share any constraints that you might occur during the UX research process. Also, stakeholders might not understand that the sample size is large enough, why you did something the way you did, and how you chose the users in your research.

Qualitative research is usually representative of your larger audience, and it's alright to point out. It is your job to explain your methodology, but you should keep upfront the limitations UX research can face.

By being transparent and presenting all your cards on the table, stakeholders will be more likely to trust you.

With this template, you have a pre-established presentation that you can use as a guide and modify to fit your needs. It has 18 slides, and some of them are already built to introduce video clips.

Provided from the site UserInterviews, you can open it in Google Slides and download the file as a PowerPoint document.

This template includes 30 slide pages that also come with a pre-established project stated. Adjust it and edit it for your own report and use the many charts and graphs as examples to implement in your presentation.

This template was made by Decoding Research, and as with the previous one, you will open it in Google Slides and download it as a PowerPoint file.

As the name suggests, this comes only from the sections pre-established, as opposed to the previous two templates. If you don't want to take the job of "cleaning" everything that belongs to other projects, this is the closest to starting from zero.

The template was made by the User Research Academy, and the download process goes the same: It will open directly with Google Slides, and you can convert it to a PowerPoint file.