Let’s set a scene. It’s the beginning of another day, and one of your kids says, “My hair’s a mess; can you buy me something to sort it out?”
You could head into town and buy every type of comb, brush, mousse, gel, wax, and specialist hair styling products for varying hair types. Then there are all the curling, straightening, and drying tools and equipment to pick through, yet, all the time, you know full well that there’s a hairbrush somewhere in the house—probably in the bathroom cabinet or in a dresser drawer in the bedroom.
That’s why you need a UX research repository.
There’s no point in buying the things you’ve already got if you know where they are, and you can get repeated and regular use from them.
Furthermore, just imagine how much more complicated that situation would be if your house wasn’t split into different rooms with specific uses. Instead, it was one great big space where everything inside was strewn all over the place, or worse still, what you were looking for was somewhere in a street full of such single-room, sports hall-like houses.
And that’s why you need a well-constructed, accessible, and efficiently organized UX research repository.
The definition of UX Research Repository
A research repository is a central archive for your research data, insights, data sources, and more, making the information readily and easily available to anyone responsible for data-driven decision-making. It doesn’t solely allow access to your UX research team but to the CEO, management, product managers, your marketing and sales team, and even outside agencies where necessary.
It’s an information store where its users can conduct, analyze, organize, and share customer or user research data and actionable insights across your entire organization.
Benefits of Using a UX Research Repository
Given our earlier ‘missing hairbrush’ analogy, the benefits of using a UX research repository should be pretty straightforward.
- Provides a single access point to essential and valuable research insights.
- Enhances research operations by organizing your research data into categories, types, and uses with common tags, taxonomy, titles, content creation practices, and policy.
- Saves time with comprehensive search features, narrowing down key findings from all your existing user research.
- Integrates additional raw data access points into a single, simple access point — research project data isn’t the only useful information your repository should hold. Customer service requests, product reviews, or CRM statistics can all hold valuable and relevant information and are worthy of your research repository.
- Creates a secure home for sensitive user research data (user data privacy is a must with shared UX research findings).
- Easy to use; exploring previous research projects with relevant data to current and possible future projects.
How to build a UX research repository
There are a few preliminary questions to cover before you start creating your UX research repository:
- Who will access the research repository, and what do they need it for?
- Who will contribute to the research repository, and how?
- How will you categorize and determine the data and its findings?
- What tool or tools will you use to build your UX research repository?
Who will access the research repository, and what do they need it for?
As we said, a good UX research repository won’t be limited to your designers and researchers but for everyone with a need or an interest in your existing research. For a research repository to live up to its full potential, its data should be available to all decision-makers, designers, developers, managers, product teams, and anyone outside your organization conducting research on your behalf.
Research repository manager: To keep your research data organized and relevant, you’ll need someone to oversee and manage your repository, delivering policies and guidelines and periodically carrying out maintenance.
Ongoing management and maintenance: Devoting time to maintain the quality of your research repository shouldn’t be overlooked. Some of your research data will be highly relevant for years, yet some will be surpassed or disproved with updates and changes to your research process and products.
Who will contribute to the research repository, and how?
Defining your repository users helps to determine who has access to which facilities. You don’t want just anyone adding information without being properly trained.
Owners (typically your user researchers) have ultimate access—defining the structure, guidelines, process, and maintenance.
Recurrent contributors (typically designers and product managers) will feed fresh insights discovered during their research when it’s relevant and worth sharing.
Occasional contributors won’t upload directly to the research repository but via one of the owners. These could be marketing or customer service teams, uncovering additional insights or reactions to updates or operational changes.
How will you categorize and determine your research data and its findings?
Before you start gathering all your data into one place, it pays to consider just how you’ll organize it. A solid structure with appropriate taxonomy (file naming convention) will make previous research reports easier to locate. You can organize it built around the Atomic UX research model: with experiments, facts, insights, and opportunities, by media, research type, user type, user journey moment, location, relevancy, by essential, useful, and irrelevant, or by insight level: organization, department, or team—but it must be organized.
Grouping studies into categories will make it easier to spot patterns and also to spot and remove duplicate copies.
Gathering and hosting your data efficiently and according to a set policy will make research easier to find. That applies to existing information and new additions—will they create new insights or update existing ones?
What tool or tools will you use to build your UX research repository?
Creating an accessible source for user insights and research data – There are typically two types of UX research repositories:
- A purpose-built piece of software or platform, or
- A homegrown repository utilizing a range of the generic (and often free) tools you already use in your organization.
Purpose-built UX research repositories
There are some excellent purpose-built specialized tools, each one designed to help you with everything you need to store every research report, easily search through your entire directory and share your innovative ideas.
However, there are drawbacks to buying into one of these out-of-the-box solutions. If the size of your organization, the budget, or the amount of research data you produce doesn’t need it, there are alternative options for organizing and analyzing your research data without incurring the following issues.
- The first is cost: If you want everyone in your organization to have access, it can add up to a fairly pricey monthly fee.
- The second is the location: Such platforms are ideal for UX researchers, but for CEOs or directors, they’re not always easy to navigate when unfamiliar with ‘yet another’ new platform.
- Third, it’s not always a good idea to be locked into a single platform: Having all your research data in a single location is ideal for your UX research process, but what if you have to move it due to budget or practical constraints? What if a new tool or user research repository blows the lid off the one you currently use? You might have to start the entire build from scratch if you can’t migrate your research studies easily enough.
Custom-Built UX research repositories
Setting up and utilizing a UX research repository – While we’ve only skimmed the surface of building your own user research repository, with a little guidance, it shouldn’t be too hard to set up and run one as efficiently as those paid-for research repository tools.
We’re betting that you already use a host of communication and cataloging applications. A few of the notable options are Airtable, Coda, Microsoft Sharepoint, Miro, Atlassian, and of course, Google Drive and all the applications in their suite of packages.
Establishing the infrastructure for a unified system across teams – You need to link your files and folders to your centralized location using a database: again, Microsoft and Google have you covered (with MS Excel or even Google Sheets, which allow you to import and export their data), but if you already subscribe and you’re used to Airtable and Sharepoint, they’re equally efficient.
The money you stand to save by not subscribing to those out-of-the-box research repository platforms could be invested in employing a professional UX research team or agency to help you set up your custom-built option, develop user training, and then leave you to get on with its day-to-day operation—and without the monthly subscription.
Summing up
Building a research repository for your operation should be a must. Building the right repository for your organization is essential. Storing everything from usability testing and journey maps to customer feedback, quantitative and qualitative data, and every type of user research can get quite complex, so setting up user research repositories allows you to organize research data, analyze user research data, and share all that data, too, simply and efficiently, with anyone who needs it.
It’s worth considering bringing an expert on board to ensure you get the repository you need and not the one somebody’s sales team convinces you that you do.
If you would like help building or creating a research repository get in touch by emailing us at hello@ux247.com.
[…] For a full introduction to research repositories, you can read our article here. […]
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