How might one go about setting up such a repository in an organization? First of all, I did a lot of research on best practices and benefits. In order to communicate effectively, you need to cite many good reasons why you should address this issue. When communicating with management, you must always be prepared.
In most cases, it is important to get commitment from management. It will take some time to work on this project. Time that is missing for other tasks. So you need to clarify if you can work on creating a repository. As I said, bring a lot of arguments why it is useful. As I explained, there are a number of benefits, such as speeding up, better collaboration, and no redundant research.
In general, you also need to consider what parts you want to include in your respository. Do you want it to be a complete respository that includes everything, such as training, guidelines, use cases, design assets, design patterns, style guides, and so on? Or do you just want to start with a UX research repository?
In my opinion, it might be useful to organize a joint workshop. Especially if you have several UX colleagues, it is necessary to align and merge all knowledge.
What could a workshop look like? How do you get all the information together - from all the teams?
I made some preparations. I divided it into introduction, definition & theory, what do we already have, ideas for research and outlook/tools/how to go forward. It would take about 1-1.5 hours to complete.
1 - Overview, why could it be useful?
Building a research archive has 3 main benefits:
Advantages when having a UXR repository:
2 - Introduction to UX Repository and Atomic Research.
A User Research Repository is a knowledge base that stores and organizes user data, insights, and research findings to help teams effectively analyze information and collaborate to improve the product experience.
On our site, we have defined 5 main types of properties: There could be different properties, such as user type, language, time of user journey, domain, type of feedback (e.g., bug, missing feature, new idea), and research methods used (surveys, interviews, user testing, secondary research, white papers).
Another interesting point is trust. To interpret the results of the UX repository, you need some background information on when and how the research was conducted:
3 – Short Recap on UX Research Methods
4 - Workshop Tasks
After this introduction, I have divided the workshop into 4 main tasks.
TASK 1.
What have you already found out with UX Research in the last few years?
TASK 2.
Write down all the questions you have right now. Imagine you are in a perfect world. What are some interesting research questions on your team that you would like to get answered?
TASK 3.
TASK 4.
1. Formulate a hypothesis.
2. Create a kind of Kano model and assign it to the correct quarter.
For me, in this workshop, it's important to create awareness. So everyone is working on the same product and we want to improve the user experience as one team.
Since I'm responsible for UX research, it's also very interesting to have all the insights together. Or also to know where to look for it. Since we are nine UX designers in the organization, it's not so easy to share every detail. So sometimes it's not so obvious who is doing what. The repository should help me to find all the methods that are executed - for details I can then search in Confluence.
My goal is to document all the important facts about the users in one place so that everyone can find them. Optimally, there would be a search option to filter by different topics - it should be quick and easy to search for specific user feedback results.
I would choose a tool that is already established in the company, for example Confluence and Miro. But Notion offers great options for post keywording and keyword searching. I need to think about the best solution.
It should not be a static page, it is alive and should be updated regularly. Any designer or researcher should work on it and help it grow.
