Introduction

Reporting is the final phase of any research study. After all your hard work, it's finally time to make a research report and share what you've discovered through the research process. This might mean you make a long presentation (using Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides), adding quotes and statistics.

The output of your research study is a report, which serves as a research artifact. A research artifact is any observable, tangible output that comes out from or because of the research process.

Without bringing back what you’ve observed, learned, and recorded, it’s almost like you didn’t conduct fruitful research. In research cultures where research is avoided or dismissed, your report might be the only output that proves that research was conducted.

No matter the research culture, your report is one of the best ways to challenge your stakeholder’s assumptions about the experience they're building and help reframe their path ahead. Commonly, experience researchers create slide deck presentations (like in Microsoft Powerpoint or Apple Keynote) to serve as research reports.

But reporting - like all things research - isn’t one fixed, unchanging idea or about presentations and slides. As your research changes, your reporting should flex and scale respectively. As you’ll read, fast research can lead to quick, short reports, while multiple rounds of research might require a long, formal presentation and document.

Ultimately, without understanding how a report's audience will react and interact with it, you're doomed to make a presentation that goes nowhere. You must know your audience for reporting to be effective.