the research graveyard

every research project i’ve ever run has the same arc. you plan the study, recruit participants, run sessions, take notes, and then — if you’re disciplined — you write up a summary. themes, patterns, recommendations.

but most of the time? the transcripts go into a folder. the folder goes into a drive. the drive gets bookmarked and then forgotten.

this isn’t laziness. it’s a structural problem. the gap between “i have the data” and “i have something my team can act on” is the hardest part of research. and it’s the part nobody allocates time for.

running the sessions feels like the work. you had the conversations. you heard the pain points. you know, vaguely, what the findings are. but knowing them and structuring them are different things. structuring means deciding what matters, what contradicts what, what the implications are for the product. it means turning a stack of transcripts into a point of view.

that’s design work. it requires judgment, not just summarisation. and it takes time that usually doesn’t exist — because the roadmap has already moved on, or the sprint is already planned, or the stakeholder just wants “the key takeaways” in a one-pager by friday.

so the research sits. or worse, it gets summarised into something so safe and generic that it could apply to any product. “users want it to be intuitive.” “onboarding is a key moment.” findings that are technically true but don’t change anyone’s behaviour.

i’ve been on the other side of this too — receiving research readouts that sound comprehensive but don’t actually tell me what to do differently. the issue isn’t that the research was bad. the issue is that the synthesis step — the one where you turn evidence into a design position — got rushed or skipped entirely.

the best research deliverables i’ve seen all share one thing: they name the tensions. not “users want X” but “users expect X, but the current architecture assumes Y, and those two things conflict.” that’s useful because it forces a conversation. it changes the shape of the next design decision.

most never get there. not because the researcher didn’t see it, but because the work of articulating it clearly — connecting evidence to implication to recommendation — takes longer than people think. and by the time you have the space to do it, the moment has passed.

so the folder grows. another study, another set of transcripts, another vague promise to come back to it when things slow down.

things don’t slow down.

if you have transcripts and recordings sitting in a folder, i offer research synthesis — turning evidence into actionable design decisions. $300.