Building A Research Repository — A Case Study with Lindsay Boylan, UX Researcher at Mariana Tek
Lindsay Boylan is a UX Researcher at Mariana Tek, headquartered out of Washington D.C. Mariana Tek provides business management software for boutique fitness studios. Lindsay was kind enough to chat with us about her experience as an EnjoyHQ customer — she discusses her requirements for a research repository, as well as the benefits her and her team have experienced since implementing EnjoyHQ.
Sofia: When you started looking for a tool, what was the problem that you were trying to solve? And what is your vision around what you want to achieve with EnjoyHQ?
Lindsay: Prior to using EnjoyHQ, I was trying to build my repository with Airtable. I was looking for a place where I could easily centralize research data and incoming feedback from customers. Airtable met some of my needs, but the format and searchability were lacking, and the volume of information contained within Airtable was overwhelming. Experiencing how good EnjoyHQ’s search and Intercom integration was is what sold me most and helped me recommend the product to others internally.
Sofia: What does success look like right now when it comes to the implementation of EnjoyHQ?
Lindsay: I think we’re getting there right now by having more people than just me digging into EnjoyHQ and pulling information out themselves. The team has been getting more involved in filtering and searching for themselves. For us, success means continuing to find ways to get everybody involved, because EnjoyHQ isn’t just a tool for me. My original plan for finding a research repository was to get everything out of my head — the knowledge I’ve accumulated can’t live and die with me, it has to be accessible to everyone at the company. We’re making good progress — more people are consuming research and pulling out insights related to their research questions.
Sofia: And why is that important to you?
Lindsay: Well, first of all, I have a bad memory so I can’t keep everything in my head. We have something called the bus factor here at Mariana Tek. By documenting and organizing your knowledge, you lower your bus factor — you’re essentially making it easier to share knowledge effectively and you’re not the single source of truth for anything. I think that’s most important for me. And also being able to look back on research projects that we’ve done and pull insights from old projects; not redoing work that we’ve already done in the past. Having a repository like EnjoyHQ with a strong search functionality helps us find past research that can potentially help answer new research questions.
Sofia: What do you like the most about what EnjoyHQ?
Lindsay: As I start each new project I pull all documents related to the topic or question into the new project’s inbox. These include support messages, interviews, survey responses, testing results, slack messages and more. Right now I’m finding a lot of use in creating rules and automating tasks related to my research projects. I’m starting to use tags and properties more to make my research process more efficient and take away from my daily management of the repository.
The search functionality is also really robust. I can use a bunch of filters to narrow down the search results, which helps us find insights faster. Even though we still have a lot of work to do for segmentation, I think that’s gonna help us a lot in projecting trends and seeing what the main pain points of our product are. With the Intercom integration, I’m able to create a lot of rules that trigger off of the imported tags from Intercom.
Our customer support team is really religious about tagging things with their appropriate product area, and then I can easily manipulate that into whatever properties I want. And that’s been really great. You guys have also been so responsive and I really appreciate that. Your support team is amazing.
