09 Nov
How to Build an Efficient Research Repository for Your Team
UX research is an essential part of any successful business. You can’t deliver excellent products and services without listening to users’ voices.
Since user insights are crucial for successful product development, they are available at different levels of the organisation. Sometimes, this can lead to siloed information and confusion between teams.
Luckily, solving this problem is quite simple. Build an effective user insights repository that holds all your company’s user research. This will help streamline your work processes and help everyone make the most of available knowledge.
In this post, we’ll talk about:
- The benefits of a user research repository
- How to implement an effective research repository
- Helpful tools that will make your life easier
The benefits of a UX research repository
A user insights repository is a digital platform to store all your research data about current and prospective users. UX designers, product development teams, and business divisions can visit this digital library and nurture their development projects with relevant insights.
But before we talk about how to build a User Insights Repository, let’s first cover the benefits:
- It prevents siloed data
- You’ll save time searching for information
- You and your team will understand user insights better
Research repositories prevent siloed data.
When the scale of your company and its operations increases, the silo mentality tends to creep in.
Workers are separated into different teams – for example, customer relationship teams, sales teams, and product innovation. These teams are essential to growing a business; however, this fragmentation leads to invisible barriers blocking crucial information flows.
This is how information silos form.
Silos cause your company to become less efficient and less organised, leading to a poor customer experience.
Luckily, preventing silos is straightforward. Create a research repository that reunites these available volumes of insights and makes them usable to people across your company, regardless of geographic location. Doing this streamlines the research and product development processes and eventually helps improve UX.
Your teams will save time searching for information.
According to a study conducted by McKinsey, employees spend over 19% of their workweek searching and gathering relevant information.
Many large companies don’t use an organised UX research repository, so data isn’t readily accessible, which causes UX designers and product development teams to hunt for information.
But if you build an effective UX research repository, your teams won’t have to spend as much time looking for information. They know that all relevant user insights created by different units are available in this unique platform. And they can use these extra eight hours every week to complete more important tasks.
You will understand available research data better.
Building an insight repository can take longer than a month, but the outcomes are invaluable.
During implementation time, you’ll need to:
- Study past surveys and papers to find out which data will be helpful to host in this research repository
- Organise your user insights in an easy-to-find manner
- Replace old insights with new information
When you spend over four months scouring through insights and organising them, you’ll gain an in-depth understanding of what kind of user data already exists in your organisation. This can help with product development and designing a compelling UI.
Now that we have explained the benefits of research repositories, let’s discover more about the implementation process.
How to implement a user insight repository
The first step to creating a streamlined repository is selecting an internal project manager in charge to develop a mapping of everything existing. This person will be in charge of collecting, organising, and reusing useful UX information.
Moreover, this project manager should create a clear project plan and communicate to teams and shareholders the importance and benefits of such an initiative.
Next, it’s essential to organise this information logically and consistently. The key is to collect data by either project or product, so it’s easy to find insights once you’ve uploaded them to this new platform.
Last, add feedback, findings, and notes that make your data easier to find. Use a knowledge sharing tool like Elium to structure each piece of information around specific tags.
Finally, the essential part of the process is to engage everyone around the platform and ensure that they have the correct information to find and share new insights. And thus make the most of available user insights for product development.
How Elium can help you create a compelling UX repository
Elium is a knowledge-sharing platform that offers businesses a central place of truth for all trusted company knowledge, and user insights are no exception.
Some powerful capabilities of Elium, relevant for building user insights repositories:
- Multimedia sharing for allowing teams to share any type of insights. Pictures, videos, voice recording, text.
- A powerful search engine that enables everyone to narrow down search results and find the most relevant insights in minutes.
- Integration with Microsoft, Google, and Slack seamlessly integrate within existing business environments.
This allows you to create a research repository quickly, collect valuable user information, and engage with your teams and employees.
Prevent inefficiency by using a User Insights Repository
UX research is an integral part of every business since it allows you to know your customers better. However, storing this data disparately often leads to confusion and siloed information.
Fortunately, by creating a research repository and using tools like Elium, you can streamline your work processes and save several hours every week.
If you’re interested in using Elium to organise UX research within your team, feel free to contact us, and we’ll be happy to help.
