After you have spent a significant amount of time with a research project, you'll inevitably begin to construct ideas about what recommendations to provide and how to best present the insights that you've derived. But before you make your big, final presentation or deliver that big research report, you want to test and refine your ideas. Getting feedback and hearing other points of view can help identify areas where your ideas can use some refining or discover flaws in your recommendations and analysis. So for example, once you started drafting your recommendations how do you test them? Well there are a number of ways that you can test them. The first thing that you should do is understand the needs of who your audience is and what they want. Now, sometimes it can be as simple as just going to them hopefully before you've fielded the research and say, what do you want to get out of this? Sometimes what I do with clients is I will literally present to them sort of mock findings. So for example to to say, okay you really want to know X percentage or interested in this product and the key features are A, B and C and the way to market it is through the brand attributes of X, Y and Z. 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. But sometimes it can be a simple as just talking to an intern that's on your team or somebody who's you're working with that doesn't have day-to-day knowledge with the research. Again, it's all about being clear and concise, and if a quote unquote layman or someone who's not familiar with your business can understand the findings, then that's a good indication that the findings are going to be clear.
