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November 26, 2025
November 26, 2025
This article has been repurposed from the webinar Storytelling That Sticks: Storytelling that Sticks: Honing Human Insight in an AI World.
Humans have had a soft spot for storytelling for millennia—and when it comes to UX research, there’s no exception.
Making narratives gives us meaning in our lives and motivates us to take action. When you’re able to make your research data meaningful (even link it to emotion) that data becomes a whole lot more memorable.
Emotion isn’t conveyed through an AI-generated summary. It's best conveyed through quality storytelling, because telling stories to one another is core to the human experience.
See how Denise Sauerteig, Lead UX Researcher at Turo, approached a novel way of storytelling for her team through video, driving stakeholders to pay attention and take action.
Denise: We are all inundated with so much content and information coming at us all the time, from ads and social media to the news and text messages.
It's essentially an attention economy that we're living in, but it's also an attention economy at work, too. Your presentation or your message in Slack is one of the many things vying for people's attention—especially those folks who are making important decisions at work.
Ultimately, we're trying to have influence, but it's increasingly hard to get people's attention. And now we also have to reckon with AI in our jobs. As AI speeds up the research process, the researcher's role will be to increase our strategic influence and communication.
AI can speed up certain aspects of your job, but it can't know the context of your company, the product, or the problem. It won't know what kinds of stories move your executives to take action. That's why honing our craft as strategic communicators is even more important as we move forward.
AI can do a lot of synthesizing and it's great at creating generic outputs of synthesis, but it can't speak for your users or to your decision makers. We want to center our voice at our company to be the voice of insights and the voice of the customer.
To do that, we need to make memorable, engaging and creative ways to cut through all of that noise, and really get our voice out there.
We’re all familiar with the routine of holding a meeting and sharing a presentation. Consider how you can mix it up with new forms of communication, such as…
When Turo’s team did this, we decided to create engaging podcast-style video snippets that excited team members and encouraged them to join in.
Here’s how we did it:
We conducted a six week diary study and ended up producing four videos for the “podcast” series. The videos included:
Sharing video clips instead of a traditional shareout built a lot of momentum and excitement among the stakeholders. They were sharing clips, watching, and really into the novelty of it.
For the 15-minute final cut, we did the following:
It took about 15 hours to pull together the 15 minute video. I didn't save any time from doing a big readout or a PowerPoint presentation, but we had budgeted enough time for this research study, so it worked out okay.
I used a combination of…
Think about the desired end product before you start making your screeners and research questions. How do you want the videos to look? What do people want to see?
If you want to deliver your findings as video, start from the very beginning of the planning on how to get good video from your participants. Give clear instructions on how you’d like the video to look—for example, that might mean specifying when something should be a selfie, a screen share, or in horizontal format. Specific but simple guidelines will make a big difference.
Start editing together video data that really shines. You can tag that data, title it by emerging insight, then import it later into another video editing program like Descript.
Not only is it accessibility friendly, but it also helps with clarity and for people who are watching sound off.
Not all your data is precious. Focus on the insights that really matter.
Do not ad-lib! It will be a disaster and you'll waste a lot of time trying to redo it. Rehearse a few times before recording and have a trusted set of advisors to give you feedback. Sharing early and often helps you avoid major pitfalls.
As you continue to work on new ways to tell stories about your research insights, ask yourself the following questions:
Put insights into a business context so that your stakeholders and executives understand how the story you're telling is going to help them and impact big decisions.
Honor the data and how you collect it, and the people that it represents. If it's a sensitive topic like data privacy or you're working with vulnerable populations, maybe being funny isn’t the best idea. But if it's something more lighthearted, then you can adjust the tone.
Ultimately, the purpose of infusing creative storytelling in your insights is to…
Whether you choose to tell compelling stories through video clips, audio podcasts, or email newsletters, strengthening your creative muscle can make a real difference on whether your insights will actually be heard and acted upon.
