13 - Communicating results

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost

In the previous chapter, we analyzed the results of our tree tests. We should now have a good idea of how each tree performed, which elements worked well, and which didn’t.

That’s great, but those findings are currently stored in our heads and in a mixture of paper notes, spreadsheet entries, and hard-copy markups.

  • If we’re working with a team, we’ll need to convert these into something that our colleagues can easily digest, understand, and act on.

  • Even if we are working alone, it’s good to clean up our analysis and summarize our findings so that we can easily refer back to them later.

In this chapter, then, we’ll cover:

  • How to record our findings in a format that can be easily understood by anyone

  • How to turn findings into concrete recommendations for our website

  • How to report our results, either as a quick summary or a full report

  • How to pass additional participant feedback along to the project team


Recording findings

Examples, marking up hardcopy, using a matrix, etc.

Turning findings into actions

Obvious vs. considered actions, recording them

Summing up the basics

For a single tree or for several trees

Reporting in more depth

What to cover, templates for slides and documents

Passing along participant feedback

Collecting, cleaning up, and forwarding to the right people

Key points


Next: Chapter 14 - Revising and retesting


Copyright © 2024 Dave O'Brien

This guide is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.