Today, I'll be sharing, how can we make us insight stick and especially talking about it grounded in my background in education. Let's dive in on a great intro. So I'll just kind of summarize high level.I spent most of my life in San Francisco, but I currently live in Amsterdam um with my husband and the Poodle Puppy Mousey, as she mentioned and I am a UX researcher by training, I started and cut my teeth in the start up world. Then I went the consultancy route and then I went back in house at the time to scale up named Adan the UX org and just an fy I, we are hiring, we're hiring across all the teams in in UX, which is product design, research writing. Um Also working closely with the analytics, but also across the company. So if you're curious if you want to learn more, just scan my linkedin QR code here, let's connect and uh and get in touch. And because you might not be familiar with Adyan, let me back up a little bit and give you some context. Chances are that at some point your money has passed through our platform. At some stage, a yen is a payment service provider. So we work with international companies like Uber and ebay, Spotify, H and M mcdonald's, you name it. And we help them accept and manage payments both online and in store. So we essentially provide the end to end payment capabilities.

These are insights and financial products all in one single global solution. Um and, and for all of us to add in creating a great experience for our merchants and their shoppers alike is top of mind. So what triggered this talk in this topic? I get a lot of questions across the business, whether it's from marketers or product managers or designers about how to make uh the research, insights, the information that they know about their users to stick and have impact. And so I would always do a Google search kind of trying to find some quick tips, have to put together lots of different articles and lots of different things in order to, to give them a guide. But I struggled to find something that really got at the heart of the challenge. So I decided to write an article about it and put it out there and I'll share a link to it at the end of this talk if you want to dive deeper into this. But essentially that's how all this was born. And so hopefully this is interesting for you and your teams as well. So something I've seen over my career is that a lot of energy is spent in designing user experience, research studies, gathering the insights, analyzing them accurately.

But I found that not as much time and effort is always given to making sure that when the research insights are being presented, that they stick, that they're understood the team that they're important to the pro teams nearby that they eventually get applied to the products that we're trying to build.

After all, the ultimate goal of doing user research is to drive business and product impact. Otherwise, what's the point? So it's really critical that these insights stick. So a thing I've seen happen is that sometimes people might spend weeks or months trying to gather answers to important user questions. But then months or years later, they don't always see outcomes from these. And these are some challenges that I've seen from not making research in site stick. For example, products are not being significantly improved. Therefore, product teams then end up undervaluing the research because it didn't lead to product improvements. And then people who actually do the research, they're demoralized.

And of course, in terms of the audience for this talk, we don't only have researchers here. We have people across lots of different teams in tech, people who need to absorb these insights, reports and presentations and then build something based on them. So hopefully this talk can empower you to also get in touch with your researcher or whoever does research and help them figure out ways to make insights stick for you and your teams or even better for you to get involved in the research yourself as well. So as Anna mentioned, I've been teaching for half my life in some capacity, whether tutoring, teaching courses, facilitating workshops, et cetera. And I found that when I apply some principles from education theory that I learned way back in the day, I find that um when I apply them to sharing research insights, the findings are much more likely to have a longer shelf life, they're much more likely to be applied to the products.

So after all, education theory aims to increase the absorbability and application of knowledge by human brains. That's what education theory is around for. So today, I'd like to let you in on this approach and perhaps you'll find it useful for your own teams, your own research.

And there are four key principles from vacation, they all focus on. And this is because they stem from best practices that have been tried and tested in many different contexts from both the classroom, all the way through to the boardroom. The first one is to make sure that your insights are relevant. We all know if someone is giving you information that's not relevant to you, you're less likely to remember it. But if it's something that you're genuinely interested in, it will be much more likely to stick. It's why it's much easier to learn and advance in a topic that you're genuinely interested in because the human brain finds it much easier to latch on and absorb that information. The author of the innovators dilemma and a big proponent of product market fit research. His name is Clayton Christensen. Once said questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven't asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. The key here is if you can get your stakeholders, your audience, the people that will be applying the research insights to ask questions about the research topic, they'll be more likely to once they have the answers to actually apply them by asking questions, they're creating interest.

And like he says, a space in their minds for the answers to go thereby making it much more likely for these answers to stick and to make sure that your research insights are relevant. It's key to involve the stakeholders at the very start of the research process. I have here a very crude diagram of, of the research kind of life cycle as we work through it. Um And as you can see here, I've highlighted it's really important that the stakeholders, the people who will be using the research insights are involved very early on and not just the main stakeholders, like maybe the biggest decision makers, they also include the builders, the people who will have to make decisions based on this and apply things based on these insights.

So involve them in the sessions where you're sharing the goals and the research questions and I have a workshop template. Um I like to call it researching the right thing. Um And you can read in depth about it. I'll, I'll share the QR code later as well, but I'll give a quick summary because this kickoff workshop is one way where you can apply this principle. Essentially, there are three parts of this workshop. The first one is to get your audience into the room. They keep people who need to use your research insights and have them map out what are the things that they know about this audience or that they think they know and their confidence level is that thank them to think through what are the things that they need to know? What information do they need about their users or the audience in question in order to move forward with their work. And then finally, what do they need in Twitter to prioritize? Um So how do they prioritize all these different questions? So I'll walk through how I've done this in, in a concrete workshop. So here's a picture of the researching the right thing workshop. This was before the pandemic. So we were all able to be in a room together, which was lovely. So I essentially got stakeholders from many different parts of the company into the room.

We had people from the on boarding team, from the customer area team from the terminals, team kind of from across the board and I had them brain dump on post its what do we know about the audience of interest? And that's what you see here on um on the the left hand side of this photo. So had them brain dump, what are the things that they think they know and then to organize them from top to bottom in terms of their confidence level, then I had them plot out what do they want to know? What are their questions about users that they need in order to move forward? And those are what we put here at the top, right? And then we plotted them out on this line, not so useful to very useful. That's kind of the impact line um rated each of these questions and then we chose the ones that were on the very right hand side and prioritize those to start with. So those are going to be the first part of the research. These are questions that are very useful, they have a lot of impact in the business. Um And they're key to moving forward and all the while I was taking notes in an Excel file to capture all of this and share it with all the stakeholders.

So we'd all be on the same page. And the impact of doing it this way was it led to the first strategic research project that brought visibility to UX research at agen. All right. Now, let's jump to the second education principle that I apply when sharing insights. And that's to incorporate various learning styles. When sharing the insights. Back when I was learning education theory, there were three main types of learning styles that I learned about by applying each of these learning styles to sharing research insights. I found that they're way more likely to stick.

So let's walk through them together. In turn, the first learning style is visual learning. And as it suggests, the visual learning style is all about processing information through the visual senses, through sight. And to appeal to learners that learn in this way, try to consider these types of deliverables. When you're sharing your insights, try to put them in some sort of visual visual uh form. For example, customer journey maps or user journey maps are a great way to illustrate visually the pain points that our users have. So here's an example of one that I've used to a again as we did for a terminal support journey that are um that merchants are having not with us, but with other payment service providers. So we could understand the landscape and the pain points that they had so that we could provide a better uh service to them, tools to use diagrams. And these diagrams help people make sense of more complex information. So one diagram that I used was the triangular communication model.

This is one that diagrams how information flows between Adan, our partners and our merchants in kind of a triangular way. And it helps us to frame how we need to include different features in our products to make sure everyone's getting the right communication. Another diagram I like to use pictured here at the bottom left is uh for example, when we're assigning our our users uh into a study and we want to share with the audience kind of who was involved, these visuals show which uh percentage of different users fell into which bucket.

So people get a sense of OK, this is who is involved in the study and this is who wasn't no van. Another great visual tool that I like to use is videos of course, a 10 to 15 2nd video can be a great way to capture people's attention and to zoom in on personal experiences to really build empathy with the audience. And I found that personal stories work way better than statistics. And there have been books written about this as well when you zoom in on a certain person's experience, empathy gets greater. And so I use this as a tool to really get the audience to care about the challenges that the users are having. And if they care, they're more likely to, to apply them to their products. And then finally, the last visual uh sort of tool that that I like to use when sharing insights is illustrations. Illustrations are a great way to tie together different themes and patterns in really memorable ways. And we're lucky at Ain. We have an awesome brand design team that has an illustrator that brings the insights to life through these custom illustrations. So here's an example, I have a theme for a research study that I did.

Then the theme was kind of missing puzzle pieces based on the experience that some of our partners were having. And I really wanted to highlight that if we just get some pieces into place, they will have a much, much better experience. And so I got our illustrators to create this beautiful illustration. And it really helped make these the, you know, the different contents that I was talking about through the talk meld together and, and create this theme that was a lot more memorable for the audience. All right, the second learning style is auditory and this is learning by hearing sounds, music and patterns. So as opposed to the visual style, which is, yeah, you getting things through sight. It's also important to learn through hearing sounds and a lot of people learn better that way.

So one thing I like to do is after sharing uh research insights, uh especially if it's in a, a virtual space like in a zoom meeting. I like to break up the audience into different zoom breakout rooms of around five people. And I like prep some discussion questions for the group to discuss as you can see here on the left hand side. Uh This are just some examples of different questions for them to discuss over the course of the breakout room. And the process of the audience hearing different people discussing the insights and their takeaways from them in these breakout rooms really helps them to hear things from different angles. And is another way to reinforce the insights, hear them from different voices in different ways, helps to make them stick. Another auditory learning device I like to use is mnemonic devices and these are devices or poetic patterns that make concept or case here. And we have these among many others, two key personas that we use, we have monitoring Milo and Driving Dre. And as you notice, I use the device of alliteration monitoring Milo starting with MS Driving Dre. These are ways to get people to remember and um really have these stick in their minds and I find people across the or even if they haven't necessarily been um involved in the research insight, the share presentation already talk about these as well.

So these are ways to really make them stick and much like Children learn through fables and stories. Our brains are wired to process information easier when it's organized in a storytelling format. And then there's common threads throughout and there's lots of different storytelling formats out there.

So there's just a couple that I've listed here. You see them throughout Hollywood or in in books. And when you format your insights in some kind of story form, that's more uh relatable and familiar to people, it'll be more likely to be able to follow and then act upon it. So I'll share an example of how I do that. I've chosen often to use the hero storyline as a way to frame research insights. So there was a project that I did on researching the needs of franchisees. And so I tried to fit kind of the the learnings that I had into this hero story arc where I was starting with building up uh who are these people? What's the day in the life like? What do they care about? Uh what matters to them? What does it matter? Who do they interact with? Really starting to build the story of this is who these people are. This is what it's like to be them. And then at the top here, once we've started to build some empathy with these people, then mention, OK, what are the things that they struggle with? Terminal support, for example? And this is the extent of the impact of terminal support for them.

This is the damage that it can do for them, et cetera. So this is that drop to really pull attention into the story and then to finish on a high note. But if we get these merchants on board, if they work with a and we can resolve their pain points in these ways if we do this with our products and this really sets a dot on the horizon for a bright future that we can build with them. And so that's an example of how I use the hero storyline, but you can use all the different storylines that I mentioned before. And below here, you could see how I've set it up. This is my working process. I like to put each plot point on a post it and kind of just plot it out on a table and then move the different post its around until the story makes sense until it fits into one of these story formats. So this is just an example of how the process works. And so the next and final learning style I'll share with you today is tactile learning and this is the process of processing information by physically interacting with it. Um And so one example of what I'd like to do is before even sharing the insights presentation, I've created a Google Sheet.

And at the start of the presentation, I asked the audience to open it up, they can all open it up at the same time and write their name in a column in that sheet. And I asked them for to in that column, keep note of anything that they hear during the course of the insights during presentation that's surprising, interesting, relevant to them that they wanna follow up on. And this process of writing out things as they're hearing them in the presentation and later discussing the insights, these are tactile ways of interacting physically with the insights and are another kind of device to help them remember them. And one thing I've noticed is that even weeks later after the insight sharing presentation, I just visiting the spreadsheet notes. So it means that this is a way for them to remember and go back and engage with the insights that we found another way to have. Uh the audience interact physically with the insights is to create a sort of interactive research, insights medium. And this was before the pandemic. Um I actually had a client at the time that I was working on a journey map and they wanted to understand the customer journey for a pretty contact complex flow.

And in order to get her to understand the complexity and really absorb it, I actually thought it'd be fun for her to map the main points on that journey herself. So I had her physically kind of take a post that we'd written out and plot it somewhere on the map where she thought it would go, we would move it around, we would discuss and this process of physically interacting with the information, really helped her to remember what the insights were and to absorb this experience.

And finally, something that helps is playing in gamify. We all love to have fun. So there's different ways that you can create personas, cards, compare them, mix them, match them, make a game out of the different contexts that these personas come from and what's important for them just as a way for the team to remember all these different information. So all in all when taking these learning styles and incorporating them the insights, you're sharing more metal and like applied, be applied to your product. And so I recommend taking bits and pieces from each of these learning styles and incorporating them in your insights, presentations.

The third education principle I want to share with you today is to present stakeholders with a challenge. The human brain loves to noodle on a challenger puzzle. It gets the brain engaged and it gets people interested in the content. So something I suggest is to actually position your insights as a challenge that the audience cares about. In order to get them to act upon it, you could share the challenges that users face the magnitude of the pain, the child cause and the using the different methods I mentioned below the audio, the visual, the, the tactile um and then later position it all is a challenge for them to think about and noodle on.

So here's an example of how I did that again. I once needed to convey how franchisees struggled with slow terminal support. So I demonstrated the challenges in three distinct ways that visual style, a colorful simple journey map that shows a flat line that suddenly drops three videos of participants explaining in very excruciating detail, the experience of not receiving support quickly enough and then direct quotes from these these users as well about the monetary and time implications of the slow support.

And at the end, I framed all of this as a how might we a how might we challenge for the audience to discuss? We ended this with an exercise to frame the insights as a challenge to give the audience immediately an opportunity to engage with the content and the insights and to start concept as a way to already start noodling and remember it better. And the fourth and final education principle that I'll share with you today is to keep it minimal. We've all had the experience of a lecture that included way too much information and we left not really grasping anything. So I highly recommend to choose quality over quantity when you're sharing insights and one way to prioritize the insights that you share is to know which audience, which group are you sharing to? Can this group or audience actually make a change based on the insight that you're sharing?

And will it have high value for the users? If yes, then definitely share it. So here I like to do it from an impact effort sort of matrix kind of look at what is the value to the user of this challenge or problem or insight being resolved. And then on the other, a access what would be the effort by the organization to do this? And if you know, in terms of effort, can this part of the organization actually resolve this? Then, yes, then definitely share that, especially if it has high user value, the other ones reserve that for the groups that can do something with it. So when we've prioritized the challenges that we're gonna share and the insights we're gonna share when we've limited them to the most relevant ones, we've incorporated three different learning styles and involved stakeholders early to submit research questions. These are all the things I've discussed in this presentation.

When we've done these things, we can go from insights, presentations that look like this to ones that look like this much cleaner, much more straightforward and much more memorable. But most importantly, the insights end up actually getting applied to creating better products faster that are actually aligned with users needs. So to conclude in research projects where we apply these insight sticking tricks that I shared today, we see the user experience significantly improve.

We see it through product road map changes, we create new features, new products, new flows, we create new channels such as applications, we see fewer support ticket tags for topics like finding something in our product. And we see a faster time for our users to complete tasks.

And that's super, super important when it comes to payments. People who do research also start to feel empowered and motivated we see that they have a much higher likelihood of actually doing research again in the future. And we also see more interest in becoming a researcher full time and these researcher career paths uh across the organization. And finally, research goes from being undervalued to valued. We see it cited at all different levels from the C suite to individual contributors. And everyone in between, we see research team growth and investment in the team. We went from two researchers to eight researchers. Within one year. We see that research requests increase from across the team, not only product teams, also marketing teams and others. And this goes up quarterly significantly.

By 20%. We search search are used for different means than we intended them. For example, they're used to, to train sales team members uh when they're joining and on boarding and we see higher engagement during insight, sharing more people chatting with us, interacting and asking questions.

So hopefully by applying these sticky trip tips that I have for making use research, insight stick, you can have the same impact on the products that you're working on. So here I have some QR codes for you. Um You can find the two articles that I wrote. Those are the first two QR codes here. Um And these are the foundation for the talks. If you want to dive in deeper, definitely check those out. And then the last one is my linkedin uh to connect, would love to get in touch and stay in touch beyond this talk. Thanks so

much. Thank you very much, Karina. That was a really insightful and well structured presentation. Thank you so much. Uh Let's give a massive round of applause to Karina in the chat. I see many people are thanking you already. My favorite highlight of your talk was choose quality over quantity. And I think it's such an important principle to apply in everything you do just to make sure that you focus on what is the most important, right? And the way you guided us also through different types of learning styles that was really useful. Thank you very much. I see people say that they love it, love your talk. That was really great. And as Catarina mentioned in is also hiring, they're going to be at the Expo area. Will you also Catarina drop by their booth and maybe join there? So people, I'm sure many people want to connect with you.

Yeah. Hopefully, I I'd love to do that.

Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you very much. So, thank you so much for being with us today, for taking time to prepare this really amazing presentation and stay with us for the rest of the conference.

Thank you.