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πŸ€” What's a good structure for a research report?
πŸ€” What's a good structure for a research report?
Daniele Catalanotto avatar
Written by Daniele Catalanotto
Updated over a year ago

My favourite research report structures of the moment

Simple versus complex answers

In this structure, I basically separate the simple stuff from the complex stuff. Here is how it looks like:

  • Summary: a summary in one slide of the most important points. Usually, I try to pack it in one sentence and have three small paragraphs for three main points.

  • Answers

    • Simple answers: elements from the research where we can give clear answers that are like yes/no and don't need much more discussion.

    • Complex answers: elements from the research where the answer is something like: "it depends", and where we need to share more details, context and time in synthesis

  • Methodology: I sometimes also send this part as a separate presentation

    • Research question: what was the initial research question or goal and why this project started

    • Method followed: show how rigorous (or not) your approach is

    • Limitations: share the limitations, biases and dangers of this research and report

  • Summary: the same slide as at the beginning repeated

Q&A

In this structure, I take the different questions that the team asks itself and give for each question an answer.

  • Summary: a summary in one slide of the most important points. Usually, I try to pack it in one sentence and have three small paragraphs for three main points.

  • Question 1

    • Summary in one slide

    • Details in as few slides as necessary

  • Question 2

    • Summary in one slide

    • Details in as few slides as necessary

  • Question 3

    • Summary in one slide

    • Details in as few slides as necessary

  • Methodology: I sometimes also send this part as a separate presentation

    • Research question: what was the initial research question or goal and why this project started

    • Method followed: show how rigorous (or not) your approach is

    • Limitations: share the limitations, biases and dangers of this research and report

  • Summary: the same slide as at the beginning repeated

Other presentations structures I recommend

This is one way of doing it, but there are many others. I've written a tiny guide of presentation structures that might help to go further: "What are good storylines I can use to structure a presentation?"

What the experts say

The people from the platform User Interviews have written a pretty in-depth guide called "Writing UX Research Reports and Presentations" which can be inspiring for many other practices like Service Design.

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