How to start a UX Research Repository?

What is a User Research Repository?

User research repositories, commonly referred to as UX repositories, give product teams a central location to collect, organize, and collaborate on user research for the purpose of enhancing products. These technologies are used by product teams and developers to categorize customer input data and come up with potential solutions or new product features to handle it appropriately. Team members utilizing UX repositories can categorize comments using custom tags rather than sifting through paragraphs of data to identify interesting trends. Additionally, certain archives for user research automate processes including labeling, user sentiment analysis, and trend discovery.

Source: Research Repositories for Tracking UX Research and Growing Your ResearchOps (nngroup.com)

What is included in a Research Repository? A research repository’s content can be divided into two categories:

• The input for UX research is data used for planning and conducting research.
• Study results and reports are the end result of conducting UX research.

There are certain things to keep in mind before creating a repository. It is important to analyze the procedures related to UX and technologies currently being used (or anticipated to be utilized) in your current company and create a plan of the research process, or service design, to show how research is begun and how development teams use the data.

Source: Research Repositories for Tracking UX Research and Growing Your ResearchOps (nngroup.com)

A research repository can include the following information:

Infrastructure

• The goal and vision statements of the infrastructure research team explain who the team might be, how it operates, and the way it plans to operate in the future. Others may use this information to better understand the team’s capabilities as well as what they might anticipate and ask for. User research team’s objective might be something like this: To maximize the utility, usability, efficiency, enjoyment, and support for the organization’s vision. For all services and systems provided by the company, the user research team can begin research on users and customers, whilst providing advice.
• The team might learn about or be prompted by a procedure and the justifications for various study types thanks to descriptions of research methodologies. Best practices and method descriptions can help to encourage persistent, superior work and even impart knowledge to less experienced researchers.

Research planning

• The team comprising of the researchers and others can look into the most crucial areas to investigate rather than on each and every product feature with the help of strategic research plans for the organization and for specific projects, such as those found within a research roadmap. These are simple to locate and retrieve when kept in a research repository.
• By revealing the method of research, its location, time and date, and the subject being examined, schedules make research accessible to everyone. With this knowledge, anyone can request to participate in learning or look for results at the end.
• Research plans that are in-depth explain the what and how of the study. They act as a vision document to unite stakeholders and the rest of the organization when kept in a repository.

The need for a Research Repository

In most organizations, the user research conducted by product designers often stayed at the bottom level and was rarely used again for future projects. Unless the team knows who had worked on a project, it is incredibly difficult to consult previous research work. In most cases, several departments in an organization could be conducting their own research and it is a hassle to find out who worked on what research and how to retrieve the findings.

What transpired after these observations to UX researchers is that previous user research was under-expolited. If there was a centralized location where everyones’ research results and findings could be stored, it would only enrich the knowledge of the team and allow them to better answer the questions of users.

This is the main motive behind building a User Research repository.

Steps for creating a Research Repository

1. Defining the vision

It is important that organizations clearly articulate their vision for a research repository right from the beginning. Creating a new UX research position requires structuring the practice and outlining the goals for user research practice. User research should, however, also be “generative,” or assist the business in “building the appropriate thing”:

The goal of user research should be to ensure that the users’ voices are acknowledged and heard by team members as they make decisions for products. The vision could be to “empower a strategic, user-centric vision” and “assist collaborators in making data-driven decisions” through user research.

2. Grasp of Atomic Research

A good understanding of this model would give a solid start and is a great help for restructuring the repository.

Source: Atomic UX Research as a Research Framework — The User Research Platform (consider.ly)

3. Define the users

• Owners are the repository’s initial contributors. They organize the repository, laying out the rules and procedures. Maintenance and assisting in determining which sources of user feedback ought to be utilized are some of their tasks.
• Regular contributors continuously update the repository with all the data they’ve gathered while conducting their research, and they also share insights when they come across something noteworthy.

4. The correct tools

The Atomic Research principles can be followed using free tools such as Notion or AirTable. Even a Google Sheet can be used to store links to research elements and will help in testing the methods and refining the needs.

5. Taxonomy

This is especially important for the research repository as it is where people come to find the information and insights that they are after. Collaboration with other teams such as the data team could help in defining the taxonomy as they may already have one in place.

The following main types of properties could be used:

• Type of user
• Country and language
• User journey moment
• Domain
• Feedback type
• Research methodology

Maintaining the repository

Collaborative in nature

As the repository only becomes valuable with the amount of data in it, the user research teams need to train other people to use it as much as possible. Documentations can be created on Notion on how to upload data, use the tool and generate insights.

Sharing other projects

Designers in teams should be encouraged to share their research projects so that everyone gets a good understanding and scope of the projects, and they can improve others’ work as well.

Conclusion

It can be a lot of work to create a UX research repository, but it can be very rewarding. It is important to keep training the teams on creating insights and have a continuous research process in place. The teams can continue to map the user feedback resources and collaborate better with other teams. A common vision and knowledge bank of main user pain points can then be established.