Presented at UPA 2009 in Portland as a kind of "interactive usability evaluation" session on June 11, 2009.

1. How you present findings
can affect your credibility
and influence
Wendy Castleman
Central Experience Design
Presented in June 2009 at UPA in Portland, OR

2. Mad*Pow Brainstorm from UPA 2008
• Convincing senior management
• Build rapport with engineers
• Selling to management
• Selling your UX group to development
• How to get your developer to listen
• Ways to change attitudes in a siloed environment
Help me be more
• Convert user research into design
• Integrating user research
• Usability seem as more than just web design
• Getting testing buy in
• Being more effective/commanding respect from developers
influential
• What not to do
• Overall development process w/ usability woven in and roles defined
• Culture and personality considerations
• Institutionalizing usability
• Talking to management about usability
• How do I get project teams to bring in UX people early on?
• Best way to be effective when you're the ONLY UX person?
• Keep UX in the institution
• How to teach people that think they know the user
• Complaints from public
• Speaking
• How to make good presentation and effective selling of usability
• More about marketing a UX team
• Evolution of the field
• Getting buy-in from developers and designers
• Communications techniques
• Tech vs. usability concerns, how to bridge the gap
• How to best present usability review results
• Working with other team members
• Managing politics
• How to share UX way of thinking in the company
• So you're all experts: How were devaluing the currency of our profession
• How to get past the boss and get your ideas implemented.
• Increasing impact at your company
Source: http://www.madpow.net/mad-pow-our-company-events_topics.html

3. The biggest obstacle for
usability professionals in
the corporate world is
their inability to make
findings relevant to the
decision-makers.
- Senior Executive at a Fortune 500 Company

4. Presenting Findings
Presentation Report

6. Presentations are often:
Built around what you have to say, rather than
what your user (audience) wants to know

7. Presentations are often:
Too complex with too much detail

8. Presentations are often:
Confusing about where the user needs to look

9. Presentations are often:
Not tested before launch (practice)

10. So What?
Presentations are often:
Lacking Help (recommendations or call to action)

11. Slide Design Blunders…

12. Four levels or more of bullets
• Bullet Point
– Sub Bullet
• Sub-Sub Bullet
• Sub-Sub Bullet
– Sub-Sub-Sub Bullet
– Sub-Sub-Sub Bullet
» Sub-Sub-Sub-Sub-Bullet
– Sub-Sub-Sub Bullet
• Sub-Sub Bullet
– Sub Bullet

13. Paragraphs
• These are the types of slides that include lots of full
sentences that belong in some type of written document.
They are fine for an occasional quote, or for a handout, but
they are not useful for presentations.
• The problem is that people end up reading these bullet
paragraphs and not spending any time at all really
attending to you, the speaker.
• The point is that writing all of your talk out in this level of
detail makes for a very information-dense slide that people
have to spend lots of time digesting before they can make
any kind of sense of it. It can be exhausting for the
audience, and certainly doesn’t build the credibility of the
speaker, who no one is paying any attention to at all
anymore.

14. Small Fonts
How do I make
a comment?

15. Imagery Style Mismatch

16. Complex Tables
Panelist_ID S2 S3 BT2 BT3 PV2 PV3 Q2 Q3 Q4
10333 Success Failure 205 262 15 22 2 1 N/A
52933 Failure Failure 91 203 9 6 2 1 N/A
61556 Success Failure 215 218 8 12 2 2 N/A
64130 Failure Failure 118 122 11 8 2 1 N/A
73010 Failure Failure 356 206 0 0 2 1 N/A
85996 Failure Success 310 292 20 22 2 1 N/A
89408 Success Failure 94 192 8 16 2 2 N/A
92959 Success Failure 194 163 11 8 2 1 N/A
102869 Failure Failure 464 199 15 6 2 2 N/A
125887 Success Success 77 203 6 16 2 2 N/A
153201 Success Failure 132 81 8 7 2 1 N/A
165772 Failure Giveup 364 299 9 5 2 2 N/A
196642 Success Failure 357 252 15 13 2 1 N/A
209852 Failure Failure 236 231 17 14 2 2 N/A
215475 Failure Failure 203 140 10 7 1 2 2
217429 Success Failure 149 113 11 9 2 1 N/A
224050 Success Success 223 239 12 14 2 1 N/A
234106 Success Failure 179 158 12 7 1 2 2
234144 Success Failure 203 458 3 8 1 1 1
298661 Success Failure 607 433 9 9 2 2 N/A
319284 Success Success 367 424 0 0 2 1 N/A
332580 Success Success 223 170 0 0 2 1 N/A
335480 Success Failure 220 149 6 7 2 2 N/A

17. Poor use of color
• Description of something really important
• Description of something really important
• Description of something really important
• Description of something really important
• Description of something really important

18. Confusing Diagrams
This way out

19. Inappropriate Charts
500%
400%
300% Success
200% Failure
100% Time on Task
Time on Task
0% Failure
Success
Task 1 Task 2 Task 3
Overall

20. Using bullet points where graphics
would be more effective
• We had 25 participants
– 3 Aged 18-24
– 15 Aged 25-40
– 7 Aged 40-60
• All used Product X
• All have a PC
• All are independent contractors

21. Random Layout of Images
• Examples of items on desks

23. build credibility and influence
Secret Sauce

24. We are great at understanding what users need!

25. We can use those same skills for presentations

26. Who is your audience (aka user)?
Executives Developers
Designers Researchers

27. What do they need?

28. What is important to them?
Executives Developers
• Sales • Minimizing rework
• Reputation • Delivering on-time
• Money… • Building a product
people rave about…

29. How can you/your research help them?
Avoid costs, Prioritize efforts,
increase sales less rework, more cool

30. Traditional presentation?

31. Alternate presentation?
Hidden opportunities within our own product…

32. Hidden opportunities within our own
product (Example)
We can do it by
Want to raise sales making a few
How?
next month? simple changes to
our website
Did you know that They can’t figure
we are losing out the difference They can’t find how
customers who between our much it costs!
come to our site? products!
But, we know what
They can’t figure …and we can do it
will overcome these
out how to buy! in the next release.
barriers…

33. Great Resources

34. Apply your expertise in usability to
presentation slides

35. Let’s evaluate some
real slides…

44. DISCUSSION

45. Let’s Continue the
conversation…
Wendy_castleman@intuit.com

46. 10 key things to consider when
presenting findings from user research:
1. A presentation is not a report – the level of detail and layout of the slides needs to be
appropriate for presenting, not reading
2. Design your presentation for your audience – keep in mind who are they, why are they
there, what is important for them, what do you want them to do, etc.
3. One message per slide – one message to understand will keep the flow of the presentation
simple
4. Lure the audience in – tell a story with the presentation. Build in mystery or tension so
they will be engaged (but be sure to resolve it within the presentation)
5. Use the right visuals – make sure that all charts, graphs, diagrams and other visualizations
are crystal clear
6. Focus attention on what you want them to see – especially important in data presentation
7. Humanize the findings – use faces, quotes or even video highlight clips to make the stories
real
8. Limit the detail – a presentation should not cover everything, just the important points
that people need to walk away with
9. Answer: So what? - help the audience understand why the finding is important to them
and what they should do about it.
10. Keep it short - Plan on taking up ½ of the time allotted. This way, you’ll build in a buffer for
further explanation, Q&A, etc. Plus, people’s time is valuable, so the gift of getting done
early is a big bonus!