What makes a great case study

Think of a case study as a highlight reel of your project. You want to include a little bit of history, the greatest hits, and why it all matters.

Chiefly, the common denominators of all successful case studies include:

1. A punchy opening
2. A robust presentation
3. A compelling narrative
4. A tour of deliverables, and
5. Insightful takeaways

These four, key things are what separate okay case studies from ones that will get you hired. Thankfully, putting a case study together that will turn heads at HR isn’t rocket science; all it takes is the right formula, narrative, and structure to make it happen.

Let’s go over how to do just that.

How to put together a professional case study

The hook

This typically reflects the value proposition of your product or showcases the solution as an offering.

This is generally done with a punchy one-liner that either is or is in-line with your value proposition for your product: one sentence that describes the value that your project aims to provide for your users.

After that, a brief sub-deck that goes over what your product is and what it does.

Lastly, you’ll want a dynamic mockup, shot, of video of your final product in action. This doesn’t have to be to an insane degree, but you want it to look really appealing, and evoke the sense that you really care about presentation, and first impressions.

The problem

After the hook, you want to describe your project’s problem. This is your overarching design problem that you’re trying to solve, who you’re trying to solve it for, and why it matters.

The problem should be your driving “why” behind the actions you’ve taken, steps you’ve gone through, and deliverables you’ve provided, which support the solution that you’re presenting in your case study.

When writing your problem statement, the following overarching formula can work well:

“Users feel ___________________ about __________________, so we need to _________________, so that _________________ can __________________, without ________________________.”

As an example:

“Users reported that the toggling feature wasn’t working well, leaving them frustrated. This ultimately resulted in sub-par experiences, and disengagement. We wanted to tackle this by redesigning the feature set from the ground-up so that users can create their necessary lists without undue friction, to drive better overall outcomes.”

another example:

“We noticed users really struggling with the document creation feature, and reported that the process was confusing. We wanted to rework the document creation process so that it is more inviting, easier to understand, and facilitates better user movement through the document creation process.”

You see what we’re doing here? Describing the overall problem, the emotional impact, and what we’re looking to do about it.

This sets the tone for the rest of the case study and lets your readers know that you’ve given some real thought to what you’re about to show them.

The goals

After the problem, your goals represent what you’re trying to accomplish, business objectives, and desired outcomes.

Your goals will almost always essentially be inversions of your problem(s). Based on the examples above, some of your goals could be:

• Re-tool document creation process for greater usability, utility, and emotional satisfaction by at least 40%.
• Increase user engagement and feature usage by at least 35%.
• Increase recurring subscriptions through expectation fulfillment by at least 10%.

These goals are concrete, measurable, and have outcomes whose impacts are felt both by users and by the business who is offering the solution.

Most user goals will include:

• Better usability in terms of friction vs process traversal.
• More engaging process that stimulates optical cortex while providing haptic feedback.
• Better overall aesthetic considerations and presentation layer of product.
• Greater overall satisfaction of experience.
• Greater overall perceived performance of solution.
• Greater overall perceived convenience of processes.
• Greater overall impact of process outcome(s).

Most business goals will include:

• Higher overall user engagement.
• Higher overall user satisfaction that results in proliferation of product throughout user cohorts and virality.
• Higher overall profitability through margins of offering, followed by volume of active, paying users (margin x volume).
• Lower user turnover.
• Lower service expense per user.
• Lower cost of deliver per user.
• Lower total overhead, and lower overhead per user.
• Lower maintenance cost(s) and associated product fees on the business-side.