“We created the research repository as a cross-product, cross-team internal tool to manage research data across products, avoid duplication of efforts and break silos within the company.”
Introduction
As part of an organizational goal for the UX/UI department, we proposed the idea of a centralized research repository within the company for teams to organize research data, generate insights from their and others’ research, curate knowledge about users and products, and share research information. This research repository connects previously isolated research studies and their findings, strengthening the company's customer-driven focus; through fostering institutional research knowledge, facilitating collaboration across teams, and eliminating costly duplicate studies.
Team:
3 UX Designers (incl. me)
Duration:
2 years
My Role:
User Research
Competitive Research
Schema Design
Journey Mapping
Problem Overview
1. Working in Silos: A number of teams within the company have touch-points with customers and users in different focus areas. We found that the insights generated by those teams tend to stay within their organizational silos. The silos create a problem of duplicate efforts, increased cost, lack of awareness and transparency.
“By the time the report is done, it’s already a historical document.”
2. Research Management: A challenge for many teams is remembering or finding past research insights to lean on. With limited time available to carry out research and a lack of organization of past findings, it can be easier to essentially re-do the research than search for previous work.
3. Collaboration: We had not seen a consistent pattern in which stakeholders are involved in research all along the way. As a result, the teams that do research often need advocates for it, and help to disseminate their findings across teams. There is a need of a research platform that facilitates multiple research methods and helps automate data collection, analysis, and dissemination.
Research
Roadmap
Review known success stories. WeWork’s Polaris and Airtable to guide us and help uncover common pitfalls.
Competitive research with internal research data. We looked at 6 products.
Stakeholder interviews across 12 product and marketing teams, and understanding their research processes.
Journey Map
Using data from stakeholder interviews, we created this journey map.
Click to view
We also used thematic coding to help validate our journey maps' descriptive information about teams' processes, and to facilitate more interpretive insights into the meanings, values, motivations, or other significances behind and across those steps identified in the journey maps.
Design Solution
Data Schema
We evaluated the journey maps, interviews, exemplar data, and the experiments we carried out while evaluating the current tools in the market. We created a data schema as a way to test the workflows and any future solutions, as we develop this repository for the coming years. At the moment we use Airtable, as it serves our most common needs.
Research Repo - in Action!
“We proposed a new workflow focusing on the discovery, collection, collaborative analysis, and sharing of research data in a cross-team and open manner.”
This workflow necessitates a centralized point for discovering, collecting, analyzing, and sharing research data.
Persona images from avataaars.com