A lot of people hear 'final report' and immediately think of PowerPoint slides. Though this is the standard, one of clients’ biggest pain points is that the deliverables they receive from research vendors are ineffective and unengaging.
“Insights” displayed as bullet points, lists, charts, and graphs work against teams trying to build buy-in or socialize findings within their organizations. We even know clients who have had to repackage the materials they received simply to make their reports presentation-worthy for colleagues and stakeholders. We’re here to say there’s a better way.
The value of research comes from its power to uncover perspective-shifting insights and inspire action. Black and white PowerPoints full of stripped-down, oversimplified content are far more likely to be catalysts of glazed expressions than dynamic change.
At Conifer, we have always placed tremendous value on making our deliverables presentation-ready for our clients the first time. Design is integrated as a core part of every project. So how does our team translate research findings into visually rich and context-packed narratives that people actually want to dig into?
Go With the Flow of Knowledge
Deliverables, like the changes they can trigger, should not be one size fits all. We first set out to understand how information and knowledge move through an organization. How ideas are shared, socialized, and adopted is critical to bringing research to life for those directly involved in research and those who are not.
At the beginning of every new project we like to take a step back and ask ourselves questions such as: What needs to happen by the end of this project? What does the deliverable need to help accomplish? How will these learnings be used? By doing this, we are able to engineer a deliverable that will best support a desired result. These conversations help us focus on how to best move the team toward a business goal or outcome and deliver findings that incite inspiration and action. Taking this ensures that the breadth and depth of the research are backed by evidence and accessible to those who were not in the field or following the research up close.
Ultimately, we aim to deliver experiences and not just static documents. Conifer seeks to create narratives and insights immersions that engage client teams and encourage them to use, reuse, and share our findings. We balance high-level takeaways with detailed breadth and depth that draws people in and invites them to sink their teeth into the details and nuance of users’ lives.
We build out our deliverables in several different ways depending on our client needs:
- Visual: Photos, videos, and quotes all help bring data to life. We layer them to provide not just one point of view or soundbite, but demonstrate patterns supported by real-world evidence. Of all media, video is one of the best formats for getting an audience's attention. No matter how many "verbatims" you put on a page, nothing can compare to hearing and seeing a participant articulate an idea or demonstrate a behavior for themselves. Not everyone understands the value of investing a little bit more in video, but videos can become viral, almost acting like memes in an organization and help socialize findings across teams.
- Expressive: We develop models and journey maps that bring to life the subtle or abstract components of an experience. For example, you could create an austere and clinical journey map to clearly define processes and steps, but what you might be missing are moments of tension, high emotion, or joy. Where do people feel stuck? What does feeling stuck look like? Form should follow feeling and visualizing the emotional layers on top of descriptive ones is instrumental to inspiring design and product decisions down the road.
- Experiential: Sometimes the best deliverable isn't a deck at all. For some teams it may be an immersive experience where stakeholders engage with the data and findings in a more facilitated, hands-on way. When it comes to things that have a larger organizational impact, and require inspiring people to act you're going to be better off creating an immersive learning space than you are standing and giving a lecture.
To tell a better story, our teams focus on providing our clients with rich, comprehensive deliverables custom-designed to fit their project needs and organizational practices. Whether through visual, expressive, or experiential design, we pride ourselves on bringing users’ stories to life through narratives that convey the bigger picture, deliver perspective-shifting insights, and inspire our clients to take action.
Conifer can help your brand foster innovative thinking and uncover prospective changing insights.
Check out our ResearchRX diagnostic quiz to find out what type of project would best suit your need!