Using data-driven storytelling to shape product strategy

A process for identifying the key insights and narratives in UX design research

Illustration by Eirian Chapman

As an experience researcher on Adobe Design’s Research & Strategy team, I recently led a study to better understand product adoption—including onboarding and usage experiences. The data revealed user journeys, obstacles, clear paths, and the challenges the product team needed to address. It was a complicated bucket of information, difficult to summarize into a single focused story. As I met with different stakeholders, I was drafting individual stories using data that addressed their specific research objectives. By tailoring these smaller stories, each with discrete insights, I was missing the opportunity to weave those key insights into a single macro story about the user journey—that every stakeholder could rally behind.

The complexity of the study, and the amount of data it revealed, led me to create a process that could help me unpack key research insights and structure the details into a single, engaging story—that would be crucial for influencing product strategy. Although used to share insights into a user journey, it’s a framework that can be applied to any aspect of product strategy.

Step one: Investigate your research data to find key insights

Our study data highlighted both experiences (user interaction with features) and broader behavior questions (reasons for product use or non-use). We gained a better understanding of both the barriers and the ease of the user journey as people learned to use our product, but because of the depth and complexity of it, I was having trouble creating a compelling narrative with actionable insights. A series of steps made that work less daunting:

Analyze your data. Our project collected extensive data and addressed questions from multiple stakeholders on multiple topics. To make sense of this complex data set, we organized it into themes to identify what was most important. This involved asking and answering questions to uncover each user's journey and the obstacles they faced:

• What type of user had that problem?
• In what situations was it a problem?
• When would they encounter the problem?
• Were they making decisions that would help them continue, or cause them to give up?

The questions began to reveal the data we had about the user journey, and the hurdles that people were encountering along it.

From a broad bucket of insights find the “truths” in your data. Take a step back from the data to discover the key truths in it. For example, did users who persevered and completed an action differ from those who didn’t? Were they evaluating our product in isolation, or alongside other tools to see how it fit into their workflow? Were they focused solely on their own tasks or on tasks when collaborating with others? As we uncovered insights and answers to each of these questions, we uncovered deeper meaning in the data.

Ensure that your insights are actionable. Once the research ends for large studies, you’re faced with the challenge of culling through it, not only to determine which parts of it are important, but also which parts will be actionable. Finding deep meaning in data requires gaining enough clarity to make recommendations that the business can tackle. For an insight to be actionable, it must be prescriptive enough for the team to implement the required change.

Examine your research through a singular lens or framework. As you synthesize your data, take the time to identify the unmet needs and requests of users that were uncovered by their behaviors. Align your insights to a single framework to simplify storytelling. Initially, my attempts at creating a cohesive research story were disjointed because I approached it from multiple angles. The turning point came when I aligned my insights to the user journey and thought process: What were users experiencing? What questions were they asking?

Don’t give up. When you have a deep and overwhelming data set, it can be easy to fall back on the seemingly less complicated task of addressing the needs of individual stakeholders. To gain clarity, pause, ask for help, or talk with someone about what you’ve learned.

Step two: Identify your primary audience

Your insights are the summation of your research data, and your audience is the lens through which you’ll fine-tune those insights. Since no story can be all things to all people, if you don't know your audience, there’s no way you’re going to know your story.

Large research studies often include multiple stakeholders, each with a part to play and a stake in the outcome, so finding a “primary” audience can be a challenge. Identifying that primary audience up front will sharpen your story's focus. A product manager may need feature-specific insights, a product marketing manager may need messaging insights, and a VP may need insights for an entire cross-functional team.

Target the person who can influence multiple areas. The simplest way to do that is to find the person who can directly address the challenges defined by your research insights (for my study it was a VP of product management who owned the entire product journey). To single that person out:

• Leverage the time you spend with your colleagues. I didn’t have the luxury of conversations with every potential audience, but I could gather insights from meetings I regularly attended and conversations I’d had previously with stakeholders.
• Understand the goals of the product you're working on. Because I’d often been tapped into other parts of the organization (marketing, growth, onboarding) I understood the priorities of those teams.
• Ask questions of as many people as possible, and from the responses try to understand where each person has influence.

Step three: Find the right altitude and level of clarity for your presentation

Finding your audience allows you to uncover their ultimate question (what your audience needs to know to make decisions) and helps you form an opinion, based on research, about what can be done about it. These will provide the altitude for your story and your presentation.

Presentations are rarely for a single audience. By focusing on the right altitude for one audience, it will ground every presentation that comes after it by providing the starting place for either simplification or deeper dive. Finding that starting point for your narrative is the hard part. There are some tips for getting to the right level of clarity:

• Tell only one story, the one that underscores the key insights of your research and directly answers the most critical business question. For us the story was, “What prevents the successful adoption of a product for a Creative Cloud member?” By sharing only the details that tied back to this central question, the narrative was clear, engaging, and easy to follow.
• Start with a direct statement (a thought-provoking one-liner that will grab people’s attention), peel back the layers of your research to find the details that support it, then shape the narrative and visuals to hit home. Ours was “death by 1,000 papercuts.” It was an extreme exaggeration, but it was also attention-getting and created a throughline for the presentation.
• Focus on a core framework to maintain structure throughout your story. We created a framework based on the three phases of use for product adoption Awareness (knowing about it), Consideration (whether they could use it to achieve their goals) and Integration (how it could fit into their workflow). We supplemented this with specifics about where people were struggling and succeeding.
• Don’t worry if you don’t have all the answers. Every presentation has a time limit (ours was 20 minutes). Show up, focus on providing your unique perspective, and be direct.
• Cut, cut, and cut some more. This is extremely difficult for researchers who often produce decks with hundreds of slides. By including every single detail about the user journey my original story lacked focus. By limiting insights to two examples (usability and interoperability), the actions were clear, and the details weren’t overwhelming. Decide not only what might matter to your audience, but how they might use the information.
• Ask for help and feedback. Finding the right altitude doesn’t need to be something you do alone. Iterate back and forth with others, spend time in dry runs, and continue to challenge the content of your presentation to make sure it will sell. I shared my deck during a researcher critique session, and the feedback I received and incorporated increased the actionability of my insights.
• Provide enough detail. Think about the decisions your audience might need to make (do they need information to build a feature, prioritize a fix, or change a workflow?) and how they might use your information to make them. Then focus on providing that level of detail.
• Think about your content in expanded and contracted form. Frame your first story to one person but allow room for telling longer and shorter versions of it. Are there other audiences and stakeholders that might find your research insights valuable? Might you eventually need to share it with executives? Or with other teams on the periphery of the primary project? You’ll get a lot more mileage out of your deck (and your research) if you look at the content through different lenses.

Every stakeholder that takes part in a research study will have different motivations, different priorities, and different areas of remit. These differences can be a challenge for researchers at every level. When we share research in a way that maximizes knowledge for a primary stakeholder, with a single point of view, not only are we more effective in sharing it, we’re also more likely to make a significant impact on product strategy. Remember to focus on a single, impactful story tailored to a primary audience and continuously refine your presentation for clarity and relevance.