How to write a UX case study (or a fairy tale).
The happiest day in a recruiter or hiring manager’s life is when they get the thumbs up to add some new talent to their UX or Content Design team. Turns out it’s also one of the most miserable days because now they get to wade through a mushrooming pile of portfolios and case studies.
Amazingly, some of the case studies they’ll attempt to peruse will be pushing the word-count meter into the red, clocking in at 3,000 words or more, and an ain’t-gonna-happen 10-minute reading time. You have to wonder if the budding UX pros who wrote them stopped to consider their user — that hiring manager. Did they even give a second thought to the many demands on her time before submitting a possibly disorganized, possibly uninteresting, and likely too-lengthy case study?
So what should you do to get the length down and the readability up when you write a case study? Consider a technique that’s been effective since Og ate those little red berries down by the river and croaked before he could get back to the cave. Yes, the story.
There’s been so much talk about storytelling that it’s easy to blow it off as another trend-of-the-moment, like Google Glass or avocado toast. But don’t. Storytelling is a legit and time-honored way to keep your audience from hitting the exits and dropping out of your case study before they’re even three paragraphs in.
The familiar cadence of a good story is something you’ll see in any kind of narrative that holds your interest. Detective novels, White Lotus, full-length features, and Grimm’s fairy tales are all built on the same foundation. You may have heard of Freytag’s Pyramid, and that’s what we’re talking about here.
We meet some characters, we generally kinda like them, they get wrapped up in some thorny problem, and then there’s a turning point where things turn out just fine or go especially bad. Either way, there’s some resolution where our characters usually live happily ever after (if they didn’t die).
So why can’t a case study jump on this same, successful, storytelling bandwagon? It can. It should. It must. The only little tweak is that the hero of these stories is you: The designer who conquered the thorny problem with a brilliant and logical solution.
Here’s how this might work. Let’s say your project is for a vacation rental website. Start by making us love the people who brought us this website. Remind us how they’ve been able to help homeowners make some extra money by renting out their spare bedrooms while giving travelers a true bargain on lodging. See? Don’t you love them?
Then we go talk to some travelers — potential users of the website — and they tell us one of their disappointments is going on a site like this one only to find scarce options for the days they can travel.
Sure enough, the site analytics show that for certain sets of days — like over holidays and school vacations — web visitors are bailing without booking a rental. When we learn this, we feel a collective sense of anxiety for our vacation rental website good-guy product manager.
Our hero appears — You! You come up with some intriguing ideas and lay them out for us. One of them is to pop up a modal when someone enters the desired dates of their stay that reads, “Can you be flexible?” You explain that there’s a UI control that lets the traveler set how many days in advance of their preferred booking, and how many days after their preferred departure date might work for them.
Then you explain how you tested this idea with travelers and 14.6% of them said they’d be more likely to book with this flexible dates option.
The product manager is happy. The travelers are happy. The hiring manager that read your case study is happy because you laid this out in an intriguing, concise way. And you’re happy because you just got a call back to come in for an interview.
Unfortunately, many case study writers will head down the storytelling road and then accidentally take an off-ramp where they go into way too much detail about the specifics of their recommendations or wax on about a new color palette they’re proposing that — while nice — didn’t really pertain to solving that original bounce rate problem.
A way you can keep your eye on the prize of story and brevity is to think of other stories that are compelling yet brief. You know this one. It’s the story of The Three Little Pigs, that first entered the culture around 1840. Figma was still nearly 200 years off, yet The Three Little Pigs remains the ultimate design case study.
As the story starts we meet the users: Fifer Pig, Fiddler Pig, and Practical Pig. They seem to be likeable lads, and their design challenge is a daunting one: How might we avoid being eaten by a wolf?
Whoever was providing the design inspiration put three pretty reasonable MVPs on the table. They could build a house out of straw, or sticks, or bricks. A round of usability testing showed that the first two designs were flawed. The third one, while it showed a lot of promise, had its own point of failure: The chimney.
The addition of a new feature cleverly installed in the fireplace did the trick. In a post-launch test with real wolves, the newly conceived Boiling Pot of Oil feature proved to be successful with 100% of impacted wolves suffering third-degree burns on their backsides.
Kudos to the designer for coming up with such an effective, heroic solution!
Now translate this same framework into your next design case study, and there’s a very good chance that you, too, will live happily ever after.
P.S. You just made your way through 964 words. Don’t make your case studies any longer than that if you want to improve their chances of actually being read.
Larry Asher is the director of the School of Visual Concepts, a professional development training center that’s been helping designers and marketers advance in their careers for more than 50 years. SVC offers a year-long certificate program in UX Design and Content Design, which includes a course devoted to writing case studies. SVC has also led professional development team training sessions for Amazon, Nestle, Starbucks, Brooks Running, Zillow, Microsoft, the University of Washington, T-Mobile, and many others.
