One of my favourite phases of the research process is the communication phase. I love the joys of sharing participant voices and the challenge of embedding information into the heads of various stakeholders to empathize, understand, and take action. I find this phase to be a make it or break it in the design research process. Good research needs great information design and communication.

During my time at Aritzia, I created the first re-usable research presentation template for the research and design team.

When creating this infrastructure for the research team, I wanted the team to communicate insights in a consistent yet flexible form. Working alongside the director of digital experience and spending time at home reading The Elements of Typographic Style, I created a robust set of slides in Figma that researchers could self-serve for their work.

I first started trying to answer why a template would provide value and how this system should work for our research team. The key philosophy I took was to ensure I supported my teammates' content. The form and presentation of the information needed to elevate and lift up the content and have the slide architecture fade into the background.

Visually, I started with the grid. The grid is the gravitational force of these slides. The grid enabled my teammates to easily fit their content on these slides and have some kind of hierarchy established.

For my last research project, I wanted to experiment with a new format. The addition I made to the template for this research project was a long-form Figma slide in which I would scroll with the audience sharing different findings that correlate to the part of the page we are all looking at.

The advantage of this new technique was that the findings were shown in context, at a pace similar to the customer’s experience, and helped stakeholders emphasize with findings like moments when scroll fatigue kicked in for our customers. For these findings, I also created a visual pattern to highlight triangulated data from analytics and AB testing. This was a really fun way to share findings and themes from one of my projects.