Picture this:
You are in charge of an organization’s UX research repository and one day, a company stakeholder walks in and asks you: “What thoughts do our customers have regarding this functionality?”

Another stakeholder chimes in: “Do we have an idea why our top competitor has a higher adoption rate for this product?”

Now, you can’t provide a quick response to these questions without scrambling to look at various spreadsheets, folders, and tons of data. Why? This information isn’t always available, given the broad scope and nature of UX research data, not to mention design research’s magnitude.

Answering the above questions can be challenging if data is scattered or the individual left the organization with all the insights.

The solution? A research repository – it makes UX research smooth and easy.

What is a UX Research Repository?

A UX research repository is a centralized repository that houses the insights executed by any organization about user research and design.

A UX research repository helps in making quick decisions and more on customer-centricity.

Here is a perfect example of a research repository by NN/g

Why Should You Use UX Research Repositories?

Here are some reasons you need UX research repositories in your organization.

• They save time by keeping all relevant documentation and information in one place.
• They boost collaboration by allowing different users to comment, interact and give feedback through notes and tags.
• They can make users learn. Users can learn from negative and positive feedback and be able to make any needed changes.
• A team can become productive as they can learn and track research.

Who Can Use UX Research Repositories?

Well, it can be used by anyone looking to manage, carry out or learn from UX research. It may be UX teams, researchers, sales teams, or product teams as summed up in the diagram below from NN/g:

Ways to Maximize The Use of UX Research Repositories

1. Allow Your Team to Take Notes

One of the best ways to involve your colleagues is by allowing them to take notes. Taking notes allows archiving of useful information and findings for future use. You can allow the attendees to have some work done and non-researchers to take notes.

Repositories allow notes to be stored contextually by the participants, allowing easy segmentation and providing structure.

You can break down the topics into questions or subtopics to make work easy for notetakers as shown in the example below:

But wait, there’s more.

The digital format of note-taking permits collaboration and search among distributed teams. Also, if you’ve got media files such as recordings and images, you can place them in the context of notes.

2. Allow Colleagues to Join User Research Sessions

Make sure team members join sessions to experience the benefits of attending early.

When you have a team that already knows the benefits, they will easily influence others into joining by telling their success stories and their experiences in the research session. It will therefore widen the user research sessions by having more people.

3. Allow Colleagues to Do Research

It might be scary, but it’s worth the benefit. Empowering a colleague to do research enables them to be active and improve their career.

For example, you can have 3-day research, where you check note-taking techniques, best practices, and tips on interviews. Show them how research is conducted or how to avoid mistakes when conducting research.

It helps the whole organization know the research approach of the organization and reduces pressure and workload.

4. Create Easy-to-Use Templates

Did you know that templates work wonders? Imagine that time you are overwhelmed and need some help, and your colleagues don’t know how to go about it.

You can hand over research plan templates, idea templates, or usability testing templates to a colleague who will be able to handle them without much struggle.

For example, an idea-template can help someone with a one-line idea for their research because it forces them to add as much context to the idea, such as resources needed or the user benefits.

Check out this Agile UX Research template example:

Templates make research plan creation a breeze. Look at it as your research projects starting point. A good template has all the crucial elements you need to carry out research and share the findings.

5. Put All Your Research Output in One Place

You might try to remember hard what a participant said about a product at a particular time. It might be tiring to dig up research everywhere.

Here is the good news: you can put everything in a single research repository, finding what you want without much struggle.

It also helps people to go through the data without asking for help because they know it is in one place.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a UX Research Repository?

It is a centralized hub where product teams store, analyze information and organize while collaborating on user research tasks to improve organizations’ user experience and products.

Why is UX Research Important?

UX research repository enables information to be accessed by everyone. All stakeholders can access the data easily.

What Makes a Good Research Repository?

It should be convenient and easy to find information about the research. It gives ownership to the organization’s people, who feel relaxed because they can easily access the
information.

How Do You Organize and Take UX Research Notes?

Find UX research tools such as Aurelius to organize your work. Take notes whenever you have a user research session, share key insights, or suggest recommendations.

Final Thoughts

For an organization to fully maximize its UX research repositories, it should ensure all stakeholders understand why and how to use them.

Remember, these are tools, and if not well understood, the people involved cannot use them properly.

Always involve your colleagues frequently. It helps them understand how to do research, even on their own.