This is the first of a two-part series on designing research outputs with the same empathy we use to design the research itself. Part 2 looks at how we present the outputs that carry our findings into the world.

Concluding research comes with a kind of apprehension. You’ve spent months designing the study, recruiting participants, collecting and cleaning data, arguing over findings, and writing the report. Then you hit ‘publish’ and wonder whether anyone actually read it.

In 2014, World Bank researchers Doerte Doemeland and James Trevino asked a version of this question about their own institution’s knowledge products. They examined 1,611 World Bank policy reports and found that more than 31% had never been downloaded, almost 87% had never been cited, and only about 13% had been downloaded more than 250 times. Those numbers are a useful reminder that producing knowledge and ensuring that knowledge is used are two different things.

We often treat the sequence as straightforward, conduct the research, write the report, share the findings, and expect the evidence will travel from there, but each of those steps require a deliberate effort to that end. For that to happen, someone has to notice the work, understand it, decide that it is relevant, stay with it long enough to find it meaningful, and then, do something with what they have learned.

This raises a question we do not always ask when we design research, what does it feel like to be recipients of research findings? We spend a considerable amount of time thinking about the experience of the person participating in a study, the questions we ask, the language we use, the mental effort we demand, and whether someone has enough context to give us a meaningful answer. It is worth asking how we can bring that same attention to the way we present our findings, and the people who will read and use what we have learned.

Our aim to understand the ecosystem around Kenya’s school milk feeding program gave us a chance to think about this from both ends, how respondents made sense of what we asked them and how people would understand the findings we present.

The storyboard: Making the scenario easier to understand

While trying to understand how caregivers and other actors might respond to a community-led school milk program, we ran into an immediate challenge. When we asked people about a program that does not yet exist, they first had to understand and picture it before they could tell us what they thought. This meant our questions risked testing their ability to imagine the program rather than helping us understand their choices and constraints.

So we drew it, using a storyboard with illustrations showing how the hypothetical program might work. Instead of asking respondents to construct an unfamiliar program entirely in their heads, we gave them something tangible to enable understanding. This was more than a creative choice; it was part of the research design. The storyboard gave respondents a shared reference point so they could see how the program might work and respond to something concrete. In other words, we were designing the research around the person answering the question.

The storyboard asked us to think carefully about how a respondent would encounter a question. We pilot questions, simplify language, think about respondent burden, consider whether someone has the information needed to answer, and adapt research tools to the context in which people will use them. Perhaps research dissemination asks for the same level of deliberation.

We would not design a research question without thinking about the person expected to answer it, and perhaps we should extend that same sentiment when we design our findings, thinking about who would be using them and how . Because between evidence being generated and evidence being used is a person deciding whether to keep reading, and Ziwa reminded us to design for them too.