An effective research repository that can surface valuable customer insights at the right moment is a by-product of a well-thought-out process of collecting your customer feedback and democratizing it across your design team and your organization.
Before jumping in and evaluating repository tools, you have to focus on setting a good foundation for your process. This will be key to building a functional research repository. In this blog, I will break down tasks that you should devote your time to as you begin this exciting journey of adopting your first research repository.
You will want to focus your attention on four main areas:
Doing Research: understanding the goals of your organization and team
Understanding Constraints: learning the resources and constraints
Learning about Security: understanding your company security requirements
Building a Taxonomy: being intentional in how you organize your content
Doing Research:
Start by understanding your organization and your team goals. Because you don’t want your research repository to be perceived as extra work, the best practice is to start by understanding each one of your teammates’ individual research processes. This will help you ensure the tool you choose embellishes the current process instead of burdening your coworkers.
You will want to answer the following questions:
How do researchers approach the research right now?
What tools does each person use now?
How do researchers present their results to others?
How do researchers consume research from others?
Simultaneously, talk to senior stakeholders and begin to gain clarity on where user research data fits into your organization.
Does your organization have dedicated researchers, or do other teams do ad hoc research when needed?
How is customer feedback collected and used in your organization?
This upfront inquiry will give you the foundation in understanding how your repository would improve your organization. You will also uncover who will be a “view only” user to this tool and who will be a contributor.
Understanding Constraints:
Once you spend your time uncovering the reason or the need of your repository and know the value it will bring to your organization, it is now time to think about resources. You should reach out to your sponsor or manager to know what budget you may expect for this project. Tools can range anywhere from $25 a seat per month to a starting flat rate of 50k + a year. Some tools also have a steeper learning curve than others, you will want to learn about how much time you will have to set up and roll out your repository to the team. Learning your limitations earlier will help you identify which tools are out of the question for your organization.
You will want to explore the following questions:
How many seats do you need to start with?
Who has to approve your purchase?
Do you have to think about recruitment?
Would you have support from others to implement this tool?
How much time could you dedicate to the implementation of your repository?
Learning about Security:
Shortly after learning about your resources, focus on understanding the baseline requirements for security. Connect with the information security officer or with the GDPR compliance officer in your organization to learn baseline requirements to use in your vendor evaluation. The InfoSec team will help you to start learning about the best approach for storing customer data in your new repository tool.
You will want to explore the following questions:
Who is responsible for information security in your organization?
What information are you allowed to store in your repository?
What demographic information are you allowed to include?
What integrations are you allowed to have?
Building a Taxonomy:
Lastly, for a repository to succeed, you will want to design a taxonomy. A taxonomy will be your classification system for all of the content you are planning to store in your tool. Why do you need a taxonomy? Think about how your team currently shares research; chances are it would be difficult to find past insights with your current system. If you don’t want your repository to become another Confluence or Google Doc, don’t skip this step.
You will want to explore the following questions:
What do we want to learn from our data?
What teams would be using the repository?
What is the simplest usable taxonomy we can start with?
Building a taxonomy is not easy, a resource that really helped me is the Webinar series offered by EnjoyHQ https://getenjoyhq.com/webinar/.
I hope this bullet list was helpful for you to start the process of implementing a taxonomy. To recap, it is valuable to spend time doing your research, knowing your timeline, promptly involving your InfoSec team, and starting early with formulating your research repository.
Once you spend time on every task I have outlined above, you should now have a solid list of requirements. The value of each tool highly depends on the answers to the above questions. But, you can start evaluating tools that will help you gather and store research findings.
Here are a few tools that I have come across as possible solutions for keeping your research insights:
Airtable
Dovetail
EnjoyHq
Aurelius
Sticktail