What is a UX research repository?

A UX research repository is a centralized hub for storing all user research data and findings. It can include raw data such as tables, graphs, reports, notes, insights recordings, and transcripts of research sessions.

It serves as a valuable tool, providing easy access to the insights gathered during research and supporting informed decision-making throughout the organization.

7 benefits of having a UX research repository in your organization

Centralization of knowledge

Imagine having easy access to the knowledge you need to make a decision. That’s the magic of a UX research repository.

It consolidates all research materials, making it easy to access and manage information. Thanks to it, various team members can quickly locate the data they need without sifting through multiple sources.

Increased work efficiency

A repository cuts down the time spent searching and analyzing information. With data readily accessible, teams can focus on analyzing results and drawing conclusions rather than dealing with logistical challenges.

Enhanced team collaboration

A repository simplifies the sharing of research findings across teams and departments. It ensures that everyone is on the same page and has access to consistent, up-to-date information, which promotes better communication and collaborative efforts.

Continuity in research

Repositories track the history of research, allowing for the analysis of trends and changes over time. With the repository, organizations accumulate insights in a structured and useful way.

This long-term perspective aids in drawing more comprehensive conclusions and simplifies onboarding for new team members, who can quickly familiarize themselves with existing findings.

Easier decision-making

With data readily accessible, repositories support more informed and accurate design decisions. This streamlines the decision-making process by providing a solid foundation of verified research. With this approach, you can build a data-driven decision culture in your organization.

Avoiding redundant work

Centralizing research data prevents duplication of efforts. Teams can easily check existing research to avoid re-exploring previously addressed issues, which allows them to focus on new challenges.

Improved product quality

A UX research repository supports the systematic collection and analysis of data, fostering continuous product improvement. By regularly incorporating research findings into design processes, products become more useful, intuitive, and aligned with user expectations.

Types of information stored in repositories

A UX research repository is a comprehensive resource for a range of documents, data, analyses, and artifacts from research activities. Here’s a glimpse of what it typically houses:

• Research plans, questionnaires, scenarios, question sheets. Imagine having a one-stop shop for all your research templates. That’s a major advantage of a UX research repository. It ensures consistency with ready-to-modify templates and a standard set of questions, like specific UX metrics, to measure phenomena such as account setup ease uniformly. This consistency is crucial for reliably comparing results over time.
• Raw data from research: result tables, cross tables, survey sheets, interview notes, session transcripts. Every research effort produces a wealth of data, much of which is distilled to address immediate goals. But what about the rest? Properly archiving this data allows you to revisit and leverage it for future analyses. When a similar study comes up, you’re not starting from scratch; instead, you have a head start with previously gathered insights that can now serve a new purpose.
• Recordings of research sessions: video and audio from usability tests, interviews, focus groups, ethnographic observations. With increasing storage capabilities, archiving recordings has become straightforward. Plus, modern tools allow you to annotate and tag specific segments of these recordings. For instance, if a participant describes their account setup experience, you can tag that part for future reference. These tagged recordings become as valuable as raw data, enabling you to revisit them with new research objectives and uncover fresh insights.

• Reports and analyses: detailed research findings, final reports, conclusions, and recommendations. This might seem like the simplest resource in the repository, but for it to be truly dynamic and effective, reports need more than just archiving. They should be carefully tagged with details about their scope, methodology, key findings, and insights. For example, if you’re investigating the account setup process, you won’t need to sift through every report manually. Instead, the repository lets you filter exactly what you need, making your search efficient. For an example of effective cataloging, you can explore Atomic UX research.
• Empathy maps and personas, customer journey maps, and workshop boards. Visual representations, such as user profiles and their needs, crafted using specific frameworks or methodologies, encapsulate the essence of research and analysis. These visuals effectively communicate crucial insights within the organization. A well-maintained repository provides access to these visuals and links them to the underlying data and processes that shaped them. This ensures that anyone exploring the repository can trace back to the origins of the findings and gain a comprehensive understanding of the full picture.
• Articles and case studies: publications on completed research, examples of best practices. The repository also functions as a knowledge library, housing articles and case studies that showcase completed research and highlight best practices. These publications are invaluable for learning. They inspire and guide future projects.

Creating and managing your UX research repository

Building an effective UX research repository – one that is valued and utilized across various departments within the organization – requires careful planning and ongoing management.

First, it’s crucial to define the goals and scope of the repository. Determine what types of information will be stored and who will have access to it. At this stage, it's also important to identify stakeholders and understand their needs, both in terms of data format and content.

Next, it's critical to select the right tools. Use technology that supports data collection, storage, and sharing. Start with the tools already in use within your organization and explore how they can be integrated with specialized research management tools for better functionality.

Organizing the data is another critical step. Design a repository structure that facilitates easy searching and navigation. The structure might mirror the organizational hierarchy, providing users with an intuitive starting point. Flexibility in navigation tools and effective tagging of resources will help users quickly find what they need.

Regular updates and maintenance are crucial for keeping the repository relevant and useful. The team responsible for managing the repository, typically the research team, should focus not only on organizing content but also on promoting its use and encouraging contributions. This includes ensuring timely updates, clearly communicating these updates, presenting recent research findings, and demonstrating how they affect the existing resources. Onboarding new employees and teaching them how to use the repository is another important aspect.

By addressing these steps, you can create a living, breathing repository that not only houses valuable UX research but actively contributes to your organization’s learning and development.

Tools and technologies helpful in the process of creating repositories

Creating and maintaining a UX research repository is a multifaceted process that greatly benefits from the right tools and technologies. Below, you'll find several tools that can help streamline and enhance this process:

Confluence

Confluence is a collaboration and content management tool developed by Atlassian. It's primarily used for creating, organizing, and sharing documentation, projects, and information within companies and teams.

Widely adopted across various organizations, Confluence is often the first choice for setting up research repositories. Its powerful integration features make it an incredibly effective central hub for UX research.

SharePoint

SharePoint from Microsoft is a versatile platform for managing documents, fostering team collaboration, and building intranets and websites. It’s a popular choice for businesses aiming to centralize and streamline information, ticking all the boxes for a robust research repository.

SharePoint’s capabilities extend to creating custom sites and portals, managing data with lists and libraries, and integrating smoothly with Microsoft Office tools, making it a comprehensive solution for organizing research insights and findings.

Airtable

Airtable merges the functionality of traditional spreadsheets with the power of databases. Its flexibility and user-friendly interface make it ideal for managing UX research repositories.

Airtable can centralize diverse user research data, such as interview transcriptions, survey results, usability test reports, session recordings, and personas. This centralization enables research teams and other stakeholders to easily search, organize, and analyze the collected information.

Dovetail

Dovetail is a sophisticated tool suitable for managing user research and qualitative analysis. It centralizes a wide range of UX research data, including interview transcriptions, survey results, observation notes, usability test recordings, and more.

One of Dovetail’s standout features is the automatic transcription of audio and video recordings. Additionally, it offers robust qualitative analysis tools that allow users to code and tag data, identify patterns, and draw insights. Users can create categories and themes to organize data effectively and generate reports with selected insights and visualizations, facilitating easy sharing with stakeholders and project teams.

EnjoyHQ

It’s a platform that centralizes all research data in one location. You can import various types of data, including interview transcriptions, user session recordings, survey results, and observation notes. It offers automatic transcription of audio and video recordings and provides advanced qualitative analysis tools for coding, tagging, and categorizing data. Researchers can use these tools to identify patterns, themes, and insights from the collected information.

EnjoyHQ also integrates with popular tools used in UX research and project management, such as Slack, Jira, Trello, Zoom, and Google Drive. These integrations support seamless workflows and enhance the management of the research process.

Notion

Notion enables the creation of rich content notes that can include text, images, tables, checklists, and embedded files. These notes can be organized hierarchically with pages and subpages, simplifying information management.

In addition to note-taking, Notion supports task lists, Kanban boards, project timelines, and calendars. Its database features allow for the creation of tables with filtering, sorting, and different view options (e.g., lists, boards, calendars). The platform offers extensive customization options, including various templates to help kickstart new projects efficiently.

How Airbnb made the most of its user data with a UX research repository

The Airbnb team collects extensive data about their users, including large datasets from UX studies and satisfaction surveys. As the organization expanded, it encountered a significant challenge:

How can we ensure that insights discovered by one person are effectively accessible to everyone in the organization? Airbnb referred to this as the challenge of scaling knowledge.

In conversations with other companies, Airbnb discovered that this issue is common among fast-growing firms. As organizations expand, the cost of transferring knowledge between teams increases. An inefficient and unstructured research environment compounds this cost, slowing down analysis, insights, and decision-making.

In a nutshell, streamlining and structuring knowledge distribution within the organization can significantly accelerate decision-making based on research insights.

While working internally, the Airbnb team identified five pillars for democratizing knowledge from research and analysis:

• Reproducibility – Every aspect of data collection, including questions asked, experiments conducted, analyses performed, and visualizations created, should be meticulously documented and linked to the conclusions.
• Quality – Research elements must be verified for reliability, accuracy, and descriptive precision before being shared.
• Consumability – Results should be clear and understandable to readers beyond the original author, with aesthetic consistency across reports adhering to organizational standards.
• Discoverability – Everyone in the organization should be able to locate and access relevant information quickly and efficiently, while staying informed about existing research on a given topic.
• Learning – Consistent with reproducibility, all researchers should have the opportunity to enhance their skills using tools and techniques developed by their colleagues.

Building on these pillars, the team developed a solution to address the outlined challenge. This tool integrates the processes of contributing to and reviewing work with functionalities for presenting and distributing it. They named this solution the Knowledge Repo.

You can read about the implementation details and the technologies used here.

Airbnb's Knowledge Repo houses a diverse range of content. While it primarily features in-depth analyses from planned or cyclical research, it also includes insights and conclusions from smaller, incidental experiments and analyses.

The takeaway

A UX research repository is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance operational efficiency and foster a user-focused product development culture driven by data-based decisions. Centralizing and democratizing knowledge, providing easy access to data, and fostering effective team collaboration are just a few of the many benefits it offers.

Investing in such a repository is a strategic move towards developing products that better meet user needs, thereby increasing the chances of market success. This tool streamlines the research process, empowers teams to make informed decisions more swiftly and confidently, and ultimately leads to improved outcomes for both the organization and its team members.