Work > THE Research System
The Project
How might we enable product teams to be more data driven?
I am passionate about utilizing data to inform design. Wearing the hat of both a researcher and designer on projects, I am always seeking for ways to better serve user insights to the engineers, product managers, and product owners I work with. The more aligned we are on the problem we are solving and who we are solving for, the more efficient teams become.
Learning that presentation decks are great for sharing insights but get lost and buried over time, myself and a fellow UX colleague, sought to figure-out a means to make user research data more accessible to other roles and departments. After interviewing representatives across the organization, we architected a cross-functional user research data repository that not only shared information about users but also collected it.
TOOLS
Research Repository - Airtable
TEAM
Team Lead & Information Architect - Alexandria Williams (Me)
Information Architect - Joanna Hoge
Discovery
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
We kicked-off the project by interviewing members of Product Management, Engineering, and Customer Experience teams to identify what types of user information would be beneficial to their roles, and how (as well as, if) they might utilize a user research data repository.
We discovered ALL participants were interested in better understanding ours. In addition, each participant was asked, “What information about users, if any, would be most beneficial to you and your role?”.
Users across all departments identified the importance of being able to quickly identify the most pervasive user issues within a product.
Architecting the DaTABase
Findings TAB
Based on department interviews, we created filters that enabled users to efficiently sort and group data by….
Product
Ability to filter data by product (our company had a large portfolio)
Page/Category
Ability to further refine results by a specific page or capability
Experience Indicator
Ability to filter by different user experiences—behavior, frustration, and delight
Pervasiveness
Ability to filter by the volume of users associated with a finding
THE OTHER TABS…
The additional tabs were crafted specifically for the UX Team in order to manage who we talked to (Participants Tab), the research studies they participated in (Studies Tab), and the incentives provided to them (Incentives Tab). In addition, we were able to ensure participant personal identity information was kept private.
Collecting Entries
Because the UX team wasn’t the only team within our organization that engages with users or hears about them, we created a portal for employees to be able to submit user data directly into the database. We discovered that oftentimes this information gets buried because people don’t know what to do with it or who to give it. The database enabled anyone within the organization to partner directly with product by sharing their insights. In addition, it helped to reduce organizational silos.
ADOPTION & Final Thoughts
The database was released to the company as a part of a larger initiative called, The Voice of the User, to help educate the company on our users and whey they are important. We were able to get buy-in from both the CEO and CTO within the organization which allowed us gain traction and adoption.
In addition, being able to organize all user research data as well as manage our research activities enabled our UX team to be more efficient, as most of us had to balance both design and research.