Beyond the deck: 3 Dynamic ways we share research insights
Research deserves a better story
The go-to format for sharing project learnings is almost always a slide deck. But we all know how fatiguing it can be to review deck after deck.
This especially rings true for qualitative research. When stakeholders aren’t able to join interviews or spend time in the field, the challenge becomes bigger than summarizing findings. Rather, it becomes about helping people experience the stories, emotions, and moments that made those findings meaningful in the first place. At a time when AI can generate generic research summaries in seconds, the value of investing in qualitative research comes from the real human experiences behind the data.
At Smart we don’t default to decks. Rather, we think about what we want to emphasize or what the project goal is at a given moment. Maybe it’s to bring our clients alongside our synthesis process so they can truly own the insights. Or perhaps it’s about building a stronger emotional connection between our research participants and broader stakeholders.
Regardless of sector or research type, here are three approaches that we use in lieu of long, static slide decks.
01 Miro boards for in-progress research insights
During the synthesis phase of research, clients are often hungry to see insights before researchers have fully refined them. A great middle ground is sharing in-progress Miro boards to show our thought process, demonstrate momentum, and build early alignment, all before building a polished deliverable. Miro is an excellent platform for this because a digital whiteboard is collaborative by nature: sticky notes feel far less precious than words on a slide and it’s a excellent place to visualize frameworks.
Example
We shared emerging research themes on a Miro board with our client, which included dedicated sections with supporting data points. We prioritized what mattered most for that moment in the project: understanding the compelling insights, how they were each supported by evidence, and aligning on how to bring it together for the final deliverable. This lower-fidelity format allowed us to make meaningful progress without consuming valuable synthesis time formatting slides.
Tip
You don’t have to reveal your messy Miro space to a client. We often copy select content over to a separate, client-facing board for a quick cleanup. This keeps the client focused on the key ideas without getting distracted by raw working notes.
02 Video stories to bring customer insights to life
What participants say is the foundation of research. As a way to elevate these human emotions, we’ve been producing dynamic insight videos alongside traditional learnings decks. Videos deliver an emotional resonance that static quotes on a slide simply can’t match, the stories people remember from research are rarely bullet points on a slide. While producing video requires extra effort—setting up in the field, capturing background footage, editing clips, and adding sound design—it pays massive dividends by building empathy and deepening insight retention across stakeholder teams.
Example
For a project exploring how homeowners tackle home improvement, we conducted in-home interviews and captured contextual footage of their living spaces. From the 20+ interviews, we edited six short videos organized around key research themes. Each video paired core insights with participant stories, ambient visuals, and subtle soundtracking. The videos now circulate widely within the client’s organization, building company-wide customer empathy.
Tip
Leverage AI for rough cuts, but rely on human nuance. We used AI video tools to index keywords and quickly surface relevant clips, saving hours of manual logging. However, human curation remains vital: AI can tag keywords, but it takes a human researcher to capture tone, context, and narrative intent.
03 Microsite so clients can interact with research insights
Building a project microsite (a small website of two or three pages built for a specific initiative) for allows clients to more easily share learnings across internal teams. Unlike a presentation that gets shared once and eventually buried in someone’s downloads folder, a microsite gives research a longer shelf life. Sites are inherently interactive, encouraging stakeholders to explore insights at their own pace rather than passively scrolling through a presentation.
Example
By feeding our insights report and visual guidelines into an LLM (in this case Claude), we created a branded microsite that overviewed the research, highlighted main insights, and most critically, embedded a custom Q&A chatbot. Stakeholders could pose queries to the chatbot such as “how did pain points differ by age and gender?” to probe data dynamically. While setting up the chatbot required several prompt iterations to refine accuracy, it created a conversational layer that static reports can’t offer.
Tip
Be very specific in the prompts. For the visual design: upload exact brand colors, typography, UI patterns, and style guides to stay consistent with the client’s brand. For the chatbot: define strict functional boundaries and restrict knowledge sources to your uploaded data to avoid hallucinated answers.
Looking ahead
There’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution to packaging research insights. Having a flexible toolkit allows us to choose the medium that best fits every project phase and client culture.
When deciding how to package our work, we always ask:
1. What level of detail and polish is needed right now?
2. What is the most compelling way to bring user emotions to life?
3. How will these specific stakeholders best absorb and act on this information?
By tailoring our output to these questions, we deliver findings on timelines that make sense, align with how our clients process information, and bring a much-needed spark of human vibrancy to research findings.