The incremental value of user interview recap emails

There are a ton of benefits to doing recap emails but there are a few that stand out to me. Sending recap emails for user interviews has been super impactful for my work. Other researchers I looked up to and learned a ton from also did this regularly. The short of it: You can be perceived as a confident contributor and collaborative partner. Stakeholders will more easily contribute to the work in a way that amplifies your impact through a continuous and repetitive practice of good research.

We are no stranger to the dreaded “bottle neck”. They may be cool when used to pour wine in a bottle, but that’s not what we are talking about here (sorry for bad pun, but I couldn’t convince myself to delete it). I am talking about that person that wants to approve everything before it’s shared with anyone else.

Some of us (myself included) have been a bottleneck in some cases through our career. For me I noticed an involuntary bottle neck I was creating (quite recently). The very purpose of this post in fact. I was hoarding information and not sharing it quickly enough. It was so bad that by the time I shared the insight stakeholders were had already been discussing the point without evidence… was a bad look.

What we want to be is the fountain of information. Being a fountain means sometimes feeling like you are a little bit much, or even a little bit wild...

However, being true to the process of sharing (even over sharing in this circumstance) has few negative consequences, if any at all. Being the voice of your users is part of the job and sometimes users have a lot to share!

The best insights come from collaboration. End. Full stop.

I feel this way for a number of reasons. First of all, insights that come from collaboration and discussion with stakeholders become the most sharable. When an insight is developed with your stakeholders the idea often catches like wild fire. This is my favorite because it doesn’t force you as a researcher to “Sell” your research findings.

To work with an analogy here (I love analogies), think of your stakeholder like a bridge and the insights are the travelers. The bridge can have a troll that blocks travelers and requires them to solve a riddle to pass through. If the travelers are not fully developed but are good ideas they still have to prove they are worthy to cross by solving a riddle. However, if it is the Troll’s friend that comes to the bridge they don’t have to solve a riddle they get to take the fast lane on the bridge directly to the town.

So to break that down… Your stakeholder is often going to have questions and wonder, how important is this insight when the learning is not something they helped develop. It requires some selling and convincing and even then they may have their own concerns. If however they are coming up with the ideas with you, they are more willing to use them in their work and distribute the insights to others! I have seen this first hand at Ticketmaster and it is exciting to be a part of it.

The more opportunities you create by emailing these recaps to get input and ideas from stakeholders the better the final outcomes are. This also leads to greater incremental impact to the organization. If the insights spread faster and more people use that insight the more valuable your insights become. This leads to a potential challenge that you come up against with tracking the wild fire, but more on that in a future post. THIS post is all about the email recap that is a mechanism for impact, not how you track it.

So this is the “See you in a future week” part of the post. I feel that I have made a strong argument for you to start sharing post interview recaps. If not, I want (dare I say “Need”) you to challenge me on it!

Here are some starter challenges I have come across before with other researchers, and will be a part of an upcoming post on best ways to overcome them.

1. Pressing send is hard

   1. One of the first things that always scares me is hitting the “send” button. It feels almost too final, like I can’t take it back and that people are going to receive it and think I am dumb, or find an error in my work. My answer to that in the next post is going to include another fun analogy

2. What if it’s too soon or too much?

   1. A common fear is annoying stakeholders with unfinished thoughts or ideas. These may even make us look dumb or like we aren’t doing our job. Trust me this is not the case, but next week we can dig more into that.

Ok so now let’s take a pause. First, thanks for getting here to the bottom of the post or article or newsletter or whatever this is! It really means a lot and hope you enjoyed your time reading/listening.

Everyone can do this with a bit of time, patience, and diligence. I used to make excuses that it took too much time but found that it was worth the time. Don’t get me wrong, this kind of thing is repetitive and takes a lot of time from the day. But at the end of the day if you can make it happen I highly recommend it!

Here are a few steps that I follow to get this done on a regular basis when doing research projects

I prefer to debrief with others so I try to get a notetaker and observers so that we can schedule time at the end of the session to discuss what happened. It can be about interesting things that came up, some surprising moments, or quotes that might be fun to share.

If you can’t get others, I recommend blocking 5-10 minutes to review notes and think about what stood out to you specifically during the conversation on your own. Try to capture moments that give good context to the user’s experience and provide evidence that could answer the goals and core questions of the study at hand. At this stage I also try to capture as much information and details that might intrigue my stakeholders or get them to engage with me on ideation.

After you debrief and summarize, you get to put on your editor hat! You should have the core of the information you want to share drafted out. The hard part here is being ok with cutting some of the learnings so that you will have a digestible and interesting set of ideas to share in your recipients mailboxes.

Here are some ways to get in the editor mindset.

1. Summarize the conversation with facts that are easy to understand. Stick to the things that either made you excited when remembering the interview or that relate back to the purpose of the study in a tangible way.

2. Provide interesting tidbits like Quotes and maybe even a video clip (takes more time, but is a good tactic for engagement).

3. Keep the communications brief, but let others deep dive even further (More on this and concepts around immersive entertainment in future posts)

Remember that this email doesn’t have to be perfect. At the end of the day you are going to feel good sending it, recipients are going appreciate the effort you put in, and new ideas are going to blossom from the work you have put in!

Now that all of this is said and done, I have an exciting proposition for you. If you were reading this and the thought of having to do all of this extra work for every project was a bit overwhelming you are not alone. I thought the same thing and it drove me to build a solution for it.

Amped Research is that solution. After realizing how important recap emails are to the work I was doing, I started looking for a solution. I couldn’t find one I liked enough, so I built one...

Now it takes me nearly no time to send recap emails, but I still get the benefits of great insight and growing impact! If building your impact one recap email at a time the fastest way possible sounds good to you check out Amped Research! You can also reach out directly to me and we can chat!

Thanks for hanging! See you next post!