Organize all your design research in one place with Nasdaq Design’s Mosaiq
This past week our Nasdaq product design team rolled out an early release of our research asset management service we’re calling Mosaiq.
We’ve had a tremendous response to the announcement, with independent one-person consultancies, agencies, and enterprise in-house teams from across the planet volunteering to learn more about participating in this alpha phase.
At Nasdaq, we’ve seen how customer research has been the catalyst to more strategic decision making, given the design team a stronger voice when answering questions, and more credibility in the eyes of executives. It’s shouldn’t be a surprise then that we take our research seriously, and that means how we organize, share, report, and manage our research assets.
Mosaiq was born much like a lot of good ideas — we couldn’t find something already available on the market so we built our own with our own resources and people. But that didn’t mean we needed to start from scratch. By building Mosaiq on Wordpress, we already had a lot of heavy lifting out of the way, which meant we could start tying together the hard stuff instead of trying to iron out the easy but mundane tasks. It also meant we could make this Wordpress theme available to the wider design community too.
Yes, Mosaiq was built for us, first. But many of the challenges we were facing as a design team with little research governance strategy seem to also be those facing other teams as well. For instance, we struggled with tying real research activities and assets to our personas to help us revisit and revise those models based on new findings. Mosaiq now neatly shows exacty which real-life interviews contributed to those models of behavior.
We also found organizing artifacts a real hassle. Interview records may have been stored in an excel files, but transcripts and audio recordings were posted to Basecamp. Findings or summary reports were emailed and then left on the author’s computer.
Instead, we now use Mosaiq to display the person we spoke to (including Linkedin profile photo to remind us these are real people we’re talking to), transcripts and recordings right on the same screen, any significant notes or quotes, and important information about the person’s job such as market cap, industry, and location.
One of the downsides to working in an environment that needs and expects frequent research is tracking exactly how many people and companies you’ve been talking to, and how many products or campaigns you’ve been researching, and the ability to find blindspots where you may need to shift course because you’re talking to too many people of one segment over another.
To address this problem, we built a filtering capability that can show us how many campaigns we’ve conducted by geographic region, product, personas, and more — all to quickly show us what we’ve done and where we need to do more based on business priorities.
Our research team at Nasdaq is one of our greatest strengths in the larger organization and in how we work with our designers who craft our investor relations, public relations, and market surveillance products. But Mosaiq is built to also help research scale beyond just the professional researchers. You don’t have to have a dedicated research team to get the most out of the service.
All you need is a PHP/MySQL web server that already has Wordpress installed, and GitHub account, and you can start putting Mosaiq to work for you and your team.
If you’re interested in learning more about Mosaiq, check out http://nasdaqdesign.com/mosaiq and complete the short form indicating your interest; we’ll be scheduling demos starting the week of May 9.
