How to condense user research into a one-page sketch
By: Kai Wong
Tags: Design, UX Research, Data Visualization, Sketch, User Research

How to condense user research into a one-page sketch

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

Thinking like a journalist helped me turn my user research into a 1-page summary. It’s always a hard process, condensing your user research into a 60-minute presentation. We can put much hard work into gathering key points that you might not present to your stakeholders. But a 1-page summary was an order of magnitude harder: my first draft was a mess, and I had no idea how many points I could support or what story to tell.

This is where the Journalistic approach helped me: I was able to sleuth several possible data stories to write about and find a hook to tie it all together.

And it all started with a sketch.

Sketching visualizations

According to Karl Gude, Graphics Editor at University of Michigan’s School of Journalism, “sketching is an essential part of brainstorming ideas and getting things down on paper so that people have something to talk about.”

Part of this sentiment comes from limited resources. In place of testing with users, journalists would often show visualizations to their peers to see if they were clearly expressing their ideas.

As a UX professional, I’m also quite familiar with the power of sketching: it helps to visualize words, allows people to focus on visual elements, and create common ground between your team. But there’s also another benefit for journalists: in the world of print, space is at a premium. Squeezing in an extra data point might cause the story to occupy too much space, which costs a lot of time and money. Your extra data point means, at best, that your colleague gets less space for their story.

As a result, deciding the key points and how they’ll be visually represented ahead of time is crucial to ensuring that everything fits on one page. So let’s review how this might work based on an example.

Forming a story

Imagine that we’re working for an e-commerce site targeted at mothers. Based on our research, we’re finding that our checkout process is difficult for part of our user group, mothers with young children.

They might be getting distracted from their kids, which leads to the timing out during the checkout process. Let’s say that this results in a high abandonment rate. Here’s a list of several other things that you’ve found out:

Mothers, particularly those ranging from 30–44, are those with the worst abandonment rate.

The average time on the Checkout page is 8 minutes.

The average time on the search results page is 4 minutes.

The conversion rate is also falling as a result of the abandonment rate.

There is a higher abandonment rate on desktop than mobile.

Users are more likely to timeout than close the window.

Our target audience is abandoning carts with the Food and Toy category.

Customer service sometimes gets complaints from users about losing progress.

Previous tasks (such as searching for products) don’t have a high abandonment rate.

These are all valid points that could be of interest to our stakeholders, but these can’t necessarily all fit on a single page. Instead, how do we figure out which things are best for a visualization? We think about our story.

In journalism, there are three main parts to a story:

A Hook (something that draws in the reader)

The facts of a story (Talking about the data)

A Call to action (What do you want the user to do with the story)

But we may not know all of these things just by looking at our key points.

So let’s walk through the journalist process to see what we have at this point.

Implementing the example through the journalist’s process

For now, I’ll be covering part of Alberto Cairo’s journalistic process that he talks about in The Functional Art: An introduction to information graphics and visualization.

1. Define the graphic’s focus, what story you want to tell, and the key points to be made. Have a clear idea of how the infographic will be useful to your readers and what they will accomplish.

This graphic illustrates the issue that there is an issue with the checkout process for our users, affecting our metrics. Specifically, the graphic needs to convince them to make changes to the checkout process to allow your users to complete the process more efficiently. As a result, what might be a hook (or message) that might convince them to do that? One thing that comes to mind is the high abandonment rate: a business metric that a lot of the team might know and find concerning.

There are a couple of points that stand out if we’re concerned about the abandonment rate:

Previous tasks (such as searching for products) don’t have a high abandonment rate.

There is a higher abandonment rate on desktop than mobile.

Based on these two points, we might begin to see some interesting stories we might tell. With the first point, we can see that although there are issues with the checkout process, this isn’t a site-wide problem. If we’re telling this story, we want to show the contrast between the checkout and the other pages.

In the second point, we can see that there might be something about our priorities: maybe there’s something about the desktop version that is lacking. It seems like we might need to gather more data about this, but this might have something to do with the user workflow that mothers have on a computer vs. on mobile.

So our key points at this stage might be:

There’s something about the process that is hard for our users

There’s something we need to look at with the mobile app

Our users struggle with the checkout process but not other pages

We have an unusually high abandonment rate

With this, we can move on to the next step.

2. Gather as much information as you can about the topic you are covering. Interview sources, look for datasets, and write or storyboard ideas in quick form.

Let’s say that you’ve done interviews, surveys and also looked at analytics data. Ask yourself, do you have everything that you need for the visualization?

For the first story, we might want more data points for our scenario: if another team created the design around six months ago, and another design existed before that, do you have that data to make a comparison? Maybe a change made back then caused this issue.

For the second story, we need more data about the mobile application and how it works. We also might need more information about the users and their workflow.

3. Choose the best graphic form. What shapes should your data adopt? What kind of charts, maps, and diagrams will best fit your set goals in the first step?

Visualizations, for journalists, don’t always mean charts: they can take the form of infographics or other visualizations. But to keep it simple, let’s go with a chart for now. I will talk about this more in a later section, but for now, let’s look at the above diagram and say that this graphic is best suited towards showing relationships or comparison.

We’re probably going to want to show how values relate with one another (for example, changes over a period of time) or how they compare with one another. We can do this in different ways: this is one area where you can flex your creative muscles and implement your design expertise.

Just off the top of my head, here are a few graphics that come to mind:

Simple Numbers (Average time for each page)

Two-color bar/column charts (Highlight color and grey)

Line charts (If you’ve done multiple tests over a period of time)

Slopegraphs (if you want to emphasize one specific category)

Stacked bar charts (if you wanted to emphasize a survey with multiple discrete categories of results like Strongly Agree, Strongly Disagree, etc.)

4. Complete your research. Flesh out your sketches and storyboards.

So at this point, we have enough background to start fleshing everything out into sketches and storyboards. At this point, you may want to consider several alternate sketches based on what you choose to prioritize.

Let’s go over some possible storyboards that you might want to consider based on our key points.

Emphasize metrics such as time, abandonment rate, and complaints:

In this type of story, we might use several graphs about key metrics related to the checkout process to emphasize a comparison.

We might compile all of these into a dashboard that highlights all of the ways that this checkout process is hurting us.

If we gathered additional points of contrast, such as performance over 6 months, we could include them here. I only included the key points I listed above, but there are many ways to develop this further.

However, that’s not the only story you could tell with the key points. Here’s another sketch of what I find to be a more interesting story: it’s about our lack of understanding of the user.

Emphasize the user and lack of understanding:

In this example, I gathered a little more data from the Apple/Google play store. That was because many key points seemed to address a lack of understanding about mothers and user habits. With the newly gathered data, we can see a new aspect of the story emerge: even though it’s not a highly rated app, many people are still downloading it, which signals strong demand.

This sort of story emphasizes a lack of understanding of users’ needs until this point and the actions we can take to address this.

If we were going with this story, I might change these charts into something more approachable, like an infographic. But that’s something that we can decide on at a later date.

Designing visualizations that speak to your audience

Which is the right story for your stakeholders? That’s up to you to figure out. But by trying to understand the different types of accounts that you can tell based on the data and sketching out what each thing might look like, we can think about which direction we might want to take with our story.

This is a good starting point for thinking about the types of stories you want to tell with your data.