An Interview with Happy Thinking People on Data Visualisation and Storytelling.
Bringing data to life is essential for insights actionability; visualisation and storytelling are proven ways of doing that.
But how does it work in practice – how do creatives working within market research crack the briefs, small and large? Tips, tricks, protocols, procedures, budgets?
Research World talked to the visualising creatives from Happy Thinking People (H/T/P)– Arne Schippmann and Sven Malaschewski – together with project director Janine Katzberg.
They covered a broad range of themes – from the basics of ensuring good raw material, using AI, managing costs, briefing participants for maximum clarity as well as authenticity and more.
Plus, the impact digital has had on the “bring-it-to-life” challenge of course.
Research World: Cool – let’s talk about capturing the raw material, filming or whatever. How do you go about that?
Arne: We have regular mini training sessions here for all our project manager folk. So that’s things like not filming against the light, avoiding noisy backgrounds, but also the basics of picture composition, sizing issues, and planning for what I’d call getting extra material in the can.
The way interviews are done is really important – and the way questions are asked, how our project managers engage verbally. Researchers often make positive sounding noises when engaging with participants – “aha” “hmm” “ok”. Probably helpful during the interview, but it complicates things for us when it comes to cutting the video.
Sven: Narrowing the amount of material generated is also key, so reducing the number of sequences filmed. It really helps in the editing process, when you can easily spend ages looking for a particular quote, however brilliant your transcript. Our finance people should be proud of us!
Janine: True – knowing what to focus on up front helps massively. My trick is to save two or three questions that you know are going to go into a video cut for the end of the interview, and then only film that bit.
What’s makes a good video good?
Arne: Shouldn’t be boring, of course. People’s attention spans are getting shorter if anything. And it should be entertaining – however dry the subject matter.
From a more technical perspective, getting the basics right – sound quality, lighting, picture composition – thankless tasks, but critical. Nobody really notices unless they’re bad.
Sven: Privacy and confidentiality always play a role – without having people given us their informed consent, we can’t use the material. Or we need to pixelate the faces, which totally destroys any kind of emotion. With stock material, music, voice-overs, videos, we need to be careful about usage rights.
You’ve talked a lot about videos – don’t you work with PowerPoint?
Arne: Of course! I’m actually a fan of PowerPoint. It gets a bad rap – unfairly in my opinion. As a platform, I think it’s great.
Sure, if you pack a chart full of text and bullet points in Times New Roman, then you‘re not going to impress anyone – but that’s not PowerPoint’s fault.
It’s actually got a lot of cool features – it’s easy to combine text with pictures and videos for example. And it has the advantage of being pretty much used by everyone, it’s really compatible as a platform. So, lots of good stuff.
And they’re always adding new functionalities. Being able to jump from one place to somewhere totally different in a presentation for example. Or zooming in and out like a Prezi presentation.
Any tips on how to make research outputs more emotional?
Arne: If it’s a video, or a film, then music is incredibly powerful. Just by using different background music you can change the whole feel of something.
Getting clients on board up-front helps, of course – personal tastes vary wildly. Relying on one’s personal taste is something I used to do, but have since stopped. There were projects where I thought I’d found the perfect tune, then discovered the client wasn’t enthusiastic. Also hearing a song you like dozens of times during the editing process can make you go off it.
How do you use the options of artificial intelligence – natural language processing for example?
Arne: Yeah, that’s a big one for international studies. We keep a close track on what’s going on, to see how we could automate stuff, transcriptions in real-time, translations. But you still need a native speaker to go over it all and remove all the glitches.
The basis of the script we talked about are the transcripts – and we don’t begin the video cutting until we have a pre-selection. So, there’s a lot of pre-sifting and filtering work done by the project managers.
Under-titles come when the video is pretty much complete.
This article was first published in German on the online portal marktforschung.de in May 2021: “Den ‘Make-it-look-great’-Knopf gibt’s auf unserer Tastatur leider immer noch nicht…”
