How do you communicate insights impactfully?
30 September 2026
Commonwealth Bank
Acknowledgement of Country
Paper Giant acknowledges the Wurundjeri, Bunurong, Ngunnawal, Ngambri, Manbarra and Turrbal people as the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we regularly meet and work throughout Australia.
We also acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognise the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We recognise that this is unceded land. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, and to Elders past and present.
Design research training
Questions
How do you communicate insights impactfully?
Opening
What do impactful insights look like to you? What do they do?
Opening question
Opening
Impactful insights lead to different kinds of action.
1.
A judgement
A call on which issues matter most, and how much more than the others.
2.
A what if
A bold idea for how a need nobody is meeting could be met.
3.
A how might we
An open challenge that frames the problem without picking the answer.
4.
A next step
A clear recommendation for what to do now.
Design research training
4.
Tell, show and
enable
Three ways to share, from broadcast to self-serve.
3.
Treat Research as a knowledge service
Design your touchpoints, your rhythm and your hunch-making.
2.
Tell stories with mixed methods and mixed media
Pick the right method, then design how the story travels.
1.
Answer questions people care about
Research should serve a clear question, ideally shaped with your stakeholders.
Four ideas
Answer questions people care about
Design research training
1.
Questions
Research is a service that produces knowledge, and knowledge is the answer to a question. To produce impactful knowledge, you need to ask the right questions.
Questions
Start with a clear question
If you have stakeholders
Ask what decision this will inform, and who will use the answer. Then write the question together.
If you write your own brief
A good question still tells you what to pay attention to. It also tells you who needs to hear the answer.
All research should serve a clearly defined set of questions. Ideally, you shape those questions with key stakeholders.
Stories
What does a good research question do?
Be generative
•Should open up possibilities for discovery and insight (rather than confirm a hypothesis)
Be guiding
•Should provide clues on who to target or what to investigate
•Should lead to more specific sub-questions that can be used in research design.
Be compelling
•To confirm the problem is real, pressing or universal enough.
•To make sure people are interested in the answers you uncover.
Good Question!
What’s it like to deal with the death of a loved one?
What’s it like to deal with the death of a loved one?
Generative
(experience)
What’s it like to deal with the death of a loved one?
Generative
(experience)
Guiding
(ecosystem)
What’s it like to deal with the death of a loved one?
Generative
(experience)
Guiding
(ecosystem)
Guiding
(participants), Compelling
What brings developers joy?
What brings developers joy?
Generative
(in unhelpful ways)
What brings developers joy?
Generative
(in unhelpful ways)
Guiding
(but not enough)
What brings developers joy?
Generative
(in unhelpful ways)
Guiding
(but not enough)
Compelling
(in a weird way)
What brings developers joy?
How might we encourage web developers to take up our open-source technology?
What brings developers joy?
How might we encourage web developers to take up our open-source technology?
What brings developers joy?
What role does community management and functionality play in technology uptake?
and
Questions
What questions have your stakeholders been asking you lately? What questions are guiding your work?
Question
Tell stories with mixed methods and mixed media
Design research training
2.
Stories
Match the method to the question
Qualitative
Interviews, in-context visits and diaries open things up. They tell you why.
Quantitative
Numbers that help you size frequency, impact, priorities.
Designing your research to use mixed-methods gives you options to tell your story in different ways for different stakeholder types.
Stories
Cut through with photography, video and audio
Short clips
A short clip of a participant can land harder than a page of quotes.
Be strategic
Judge when to let the participants tell your stakeholders the bad news.
People can skim past a quote on a slide. It’s much harder to ignore someone’s voice.
Stories
Take the design seriously
Use metaphors
People keep insurance that feels like a necessity, and drop what feels like a luxury. The image does the explaining.
Design the artefact
Treat the journey map, the report and the booklet as designed things, not appendices.
Metaphors, art direction and data visualisation help an insight travel after you leave the room.
Stories
Use templates as research tools
Templates to help participants
People can more easily tell their story through something. Provide scaffolding for participants that helps you tell the stories you want to tell.
Templates as prototype
Design research tools can help you prototype your project outputs early. Treat your sharing opportunities as research moments themselves.
The right template shapes what you notice, collect and compare, not just how you report it.
Research as a knowledge service
Design research training
3.
Service
Design your project as a service
Design your touchpoints
Plan the kick-off, check-ins, show-and-tells and readout as moments to build trust.
Keep a rhythm
Share on a schedule people can rely on. Our Evidence Explorer updates led with decisions, not features shipped.
As researchers, we’re service providers. Project design is service design.
3 week cycle
Our approach
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
We’ll continuously prioritise, share and reflect on how we’re working together each cycle.
Planning
Each cycle will start with a planning session to align on objectives and prioritise what we’re working on.
WIPs
We’ll have regular check points to ensure everyone is across the work and progress.
Demos
At the end of each cycle we’ll share where the design is and discuss how it could move into build.
Retros
Reflect on how the last cycle went and see if the ways of working or approach could be improved.
Service
Make hunches together
Invite them in
Bring stakeholders to the wall while the story is still forming. They’ll back what they helped make.
Compare things
The most powerful stories compare: start to finish, moment to moment, tensions and outliers.
Collective hunch-making is making stories together. Research rarely stands on its own. You need advocates.
Tell, show and enable
Design research training
4.
Tell, show, enable
For people to believe your big insight, they need to know how you got it.
Tell, show, enable
Three modes of the service
Tell (for tourists)
Broadcast the story. Reports, talks and videos, using every storytelling technique.
Show (for explorers)
Let them see the raw material and how you got there.
Enable (for locals)
Give them what they need to use the insights without you.
Different people need different ways in. Match the mode to the audience.
Tell, show, enable
Show the work in progress
Share early
Scaffold their understanding by sharing your own as it forms.
Show it in public
Prototype your findings in a shared space, where people can poke at them.
Reports are good. Works in progress are better.
Tell, show, enable
AI Enables a different kind of Showing
Prototyping has always made research tangible
Some people just don’t want to spend time in a problem space, and can more easily imagine the potential through objects, systems and artifacts from the future.
Insights come to life
Interactive explorations and demos have never been easier to create.
Rather than just simply articulating opportunity areas or talking in abstract about solutions, you can actually make them.
Tell, show, enable
Enable: let people self-serve
Built on their access
Access runs off VicHealth’s own security groups. Admins, reviewers and viewers get the right access when they sign in.
Every claim traceable
Each evidence item shows its source and opens the original report. Reviewers filter, comment and approve for themselves.
Evidence Explorer puts VicHealth’s evidence in their own hands. The best insight is one they can find again without you.
Tell, show, enable
Make it live, not a PDF
Engaged, not just read
Stakeholders rated 20 draft shift statements on a Quick page before anything went live.
Your version of this
You don’t need our tool. Anything live and commentable beats a static report.
PaperGiant has developed a rapid prototyping platform called Quick, which lets us publish findings and prototypes as live pages directly from AI platforms. People open, comment and annotate in place.
Questions
In what ways do you tell, show and enable currently?
Question
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Design research training
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