The Babbel User Insights Museum: Unleashing the Power of Insights through Storytelling

You made it! You successfully collaborated with multiple stakeholders, not only generating insights at the end of the design process but also delivering precious insights throughout the product development journey. Perhaps, you are lucky enough to be part of a large UX team working across the user journey.

Now comes the next set of challenges– How do you ensure that the knowledge you and your team generated is openly shared across the organization? How do you ensure that these insights are supporting decision-making in different parts of the product?

At the end of 2023, our team of researchers at Babbel decided to face this challenge head-on and bring an old dream to life: a User Insights Museum.

The plan

An article shared in our Slack channel by Polly Radebaugh, Research Operations Manager, sparked the flame of raising a forgotten plan in our Research backlog. Jerley Castro, Senior UX researcher, originally proposed the idea of building a museum with different rooms where people could walk around and interact with the insights generated. I, Giovanna Gaspari — Senior UX researcher, joined the team with the spirit of “let’s make it happen!”.

We initiated the project with some of our researchers to clarify the scope and intent of the museum, brainstorm ideas, raise concerns, and understand their availability to participate.

Then, it was time to kick off the museum creation.

Hands on!

#1 — Collecting insights

We tasked each researcher with reviewing their projects and defining 10 insights that they believe everyone should know. These insights should help teams and stakeholders to better understand our users and make informed product decisions aligned with company OKRs and business goals.

#2 — Making sense out of it!

With 63 insights on our hands, our dream was to connect all of them in one cohesive narrative. We wanted to create an interactive experience in which all Babbel employees, or as we call ourselves ‘Babbelonians’, could easily learn about our users.

We wanted to connect the dots and provide tangible and insightful information in a resource that would engage and inspire people, encouraging them to return again and again. This was the most difficult part of the work. We started with card sorting to identify the patterns and uncover the underlying themes, resulting in a raw concept of the rooms and the insights we would place in each.

Jerley and Polly joined forces to connect the insights and write an explanatory script, while I was responsible for the visual design.

#3 — Why only UXR? Collaborating with Product analysts and Market Insights

Insights about our users aren’t only generated by UXR. Fortunately, we partner with Product Analytics and Market Insights in our daily projects, so why not do it here? We brought these teams on board and they contributed with more insights, rounding out the narrative to give a fuller picture.

The exhibition is now open to the public!

Our final User Insights Museum was released 4 weeks later to all Babbelonians! It was built on Miro and was composed of 9 rooms. On the left side of the graphic below, you can see that the tour started with a room introducing the various elements of the museum, the library with links to all the studies mentioned, and a feedback kiosk.

We added a “Room of Big Numbers” in which we shared the UXR Team’s achievements. It covers the number of projects, interviews, hours of work, and other curiosities about our team. It was absolutely amazing to see the summary of so much work being shared within the company and materializing how our expertise is moving the product needle.

On the right side, Babbeloanians found the five insights rooms where they could learn about what triggers users’ curiosity to learn a language, the navigation through the first stages of activation, the engagement with the language and the culture, the development and nurturing of healthy learning habits, and the challenges faced.

We used our creativity to write prompts on Midjourney to illustrate every insight (“An illustration of __ in this artist style”), and the output was beautiful images inspired by 5 artists; Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Os Gêmeos, and Picasso.

The cherry on the top was our audio guide. Yes, you read it right! Jerley and Polly wrote a brilliant script for each room that provided more details about every insight and connected it to the next one. We asked our researchers to record it using Miro’s Talktrack feature which allowed viewers to hear the explanations and have a more immersive and interactive experience.

Impact and learnings

The first step to spread the news was sharing it in all relevant Slack channels, and mentioning it during our weekly meetings with teams or 1:1s with stakeholders.

Our Head of User Insights, Jennifer Dorman secured a spot for us to present the User Insights Museum at our first 2024 company Monday Stand Up. After this presentation, the Museum was visited by Babbelonians from across the organization, including our C-levels. We were invited to share it again in team meetings that extended beyond Product and the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive.

This project taught us valuable lessons about sharing insights and making them a key part of our team’s decision-making process. To sum things up, here are our key learnings:

• Make it a real project, not a side one: Set goals, responsibilities, and timelines as you would for any project. Prioritize your time on it to ensure a timely delivery.
• Collaborate with different experts to maximize your impact: Integrating data from multiple sources will make your narrative stronger, and you will obtain the buy-in from important stakeholders to dedicate time to work on your project.
• Connect the dots and digest the knowledge before sharing: Simply sharing a list of studies completed in the year would not have been as successful for us because people generally enjoy stories. Be sure to create a narrative which integrates insights from different parts of the product and design process, and makes it accessible and comprehensible for all.
• Remind people about it from time to time: Repeat and reinforce this artifact whenever possible. Be sure to include it in various company communications, mention it in meetings, and sell it to all stakeholders.