What is a UX Research Repository?
Organize your research for maximum impact
User experience (UX) research is important for learning about your users and their behavior. It gives you insight into why people use your products and why they pay for it, enabling you to improve your products and deliver more value.
If you’re not sure what UX research is, you can read this explainer: What is User Experience Research?
But when doing UX research, you’ll quickly run into some problems that can reduce the impact it could have on the organization.
Problems when doing UX research
- Research turns into a huge pile of notes and reports. It becomes very hard to extract any insight from your research as you have to read through it all to find some patterns.
- Research is spread out over multiple people and stored in multiple places, making it hard to access it.
- Research gets lost (in shared drives, powerpoint presentations, Teams messages, emails, etc).
- Research is not distributed well inside the organization, so it doesn’t stay top-of-mind with decision-makers.
Research is pointless if it doesn’t help in making better decisions
Solution: the research repository
A research repository is the single place where you store all your UX research. This enables you to organize and analyze it all together and distribute it neatly throughout your organization.
- Everything can be found in one place
- It enables you to tag notes and analyze them, so you can find patterns across research notes and across projects
- Research insights from old projects can be found and reused in new projects
- Having it all organized together makes it simpler to distribute insights inside your organization and influence decision making with solid research
There’s also some nice additional benefits:
- Onboarding of new employees gets easier. When you’re starting a new job the amount of information can be overwhelming. It helps if there’s a one-stop-shop for all the UX research that can be browsed through.
- Biases in your research become more clear, e.g. “We heard a lot of praise about feature X, but we now see that we only spoke with advanced users with considerable technical knowledge”
- It enables you to standardize and speed up UX research. Your research repository can contain documentation on how to conduct research using different methods and on how to analyze the results. Standardizing your research also opens up possibilities like recording interviews and automatically transcribing them through connected transcription services so you won’t have to take notes anymore.
A research repository enables you to extract maximum value from your UX research
I would recommend Dovetail if you’re just starting out with your first UX research repository. I’m not sponsored by them, just a happy user.
