Now if they say yes, that's exactly what I'm looking for,
then you obviously need to include those types of questions in your research.
And then you can just present the findings in the format that your client requested.
That's the easiest way to do it.
But again, that entails you having some amount of foresight about
what your client wants before you've done the research.
Now just imagine, for example, that you haven't necessarily done that.
The other thing that you can do is talk to some of your other colleagues if you do
have colleagues on a project and share your research findings with them.
This is something that I used to do quite frequently when I worked at a large video
games company.
I had a team of five and we would often report to executives.
But before we ever developed any presentation that would go to
the executives, as a team we would sit down and go through the findings.
And invariably there would be something that I would have overlooked that one of
my colleagues would have pointed out was really important.
And then we would revise that presentation until we felt like, wow.
Okay, this is really encapsulating what we think this exact audience needs.
Now, let's talk again about your audience or
it may be your end users, your internal clients, your external clients.
This is where you really want to work together as a partnership.
So another thing that I do is I'll often send either a top line report or
a short summary of the findings.
And again, not very long, could be a page or two,
it could be those aforementioned ten or so recommendations and say,
hey this is what we're working on for the report, is this what you are looking for?
Now sometimes, it is.
Sometimes, it's not.
But that's okay because you'd much rather get that negative
feedback before you are sitting in a room with them presenting the final findings.
So always think about doing some sort of, I like to call it a draft review or
an interim finding report, to check in with these respective
audiences to make sure that you're on target with what they're looking for.
The other thing that you can do which is very helpful,
is just give it to somebody that doesn't have a lot of context of the business.
Now again, you may be under confidentiality aspects or
you may not be able to share with particular external audiences.
So you have to be very careful about this.
But, for example in my business I have an editor who doesn't work in technology.
But she always reads all of our reports and if she doesn't understand something,
she'll come back to me and say, I don't get this, what does this mean?
And she's kind of what we like to call a layman.
She's not in the business but she can provide some insights to
make sure whether or not I'm being clear and concise about those findings.
Now again, you have to be recognizant if there are any confidentiality
aspects or if people don't want the research shared to people.