The quality of your user experience will single-handedly make or break how happy your customers are to engage with your brand. A frustrating UX will drive customers away, as they’ll struggle to interact with your website, application, or services. Creating a streamlined and refined user experience ensures that every single point of interaction with your brand goes as smoothly as possible, helping to boost interaction and drive profit.
In fact, UX is so important that a Forrester report demonstrates that improving UX design of a website can increase conversion by up to 400%. That incredible increase clearly shows how vital UX is. Yet, many companies don’t know where to begin when it comes to effectively researching and responding to insights from UX research.
In this article, we’ll dive into the world of UX research, commenting on how you can create an effective UX research repository and draw insights from your investigations with ease. Let’s jump right in.
What is a UX Research Repository?
A user experience research repository is a singular storage system where you keep all of the insights, raw data, and information related to any UX research you conduct. A centralized space ensures that everyone from your business can access this information, empowering your teams to rapidly draw from your insights and bring about effective change to better your user experience across the board.
Research repositories are incredibly common, with many organizations using them to centralize data. In fact, the world of academia also uses research repositories to allow academics easy access to all available research on certain topics.
A research repository is by far the most effective way of storing a large quantity of information, as it helps anyone who interacts with that data quickly see where certain insights came from and allows them to follow the trail of that data to check its findings.
Most companies find that without a research repository, UX researchers may conduct the same research on the same data, wasting time and resources. What’s more, researchers may be unable to encounter previous research data, meaning that they cannot build effective cases for future research pursuits.
What Are the Benefits of Collecting Research in a Research Repository?
When you collect research into a singular organism, all of your employees and data engineers have one location that they’ll go to when looking to engage with data. Not only does this increase the general access that people have to data, but it ensures that your company doesn’t waste any of its resources when it comes to managing data.
Considering the sheer scale of UX research that can come into a business, centralizing your research as early as possible can lead to faster insights, which allows your business to take action to improve as soon as possible.
Here are a number of other benefits of collecting research into a centralized database repository:
- Defeat Data Silos – Data silos are one of the most difficult aspects to manage when it comes to data infrastructure, especially in growing organizations. Data silos impede clear communication across different teams and internal environments, leading to certain types of data not being available to those that need it. When your business utilizes one single research repository, you no longer have this problem and can engage with your data across all teams, hierarchies, and departments to improve accessibility for all and overcome previous data silos.
- Rapidly Consult Previous Research – One of the primary reasons that data analysts waste time in siloed systems is that they may be working with data that has already been processed. Without clear visibility across your entire data ecosystem, your team may spend time working on the same data without knowing it. On the contrary, with a centralized research repository, everyone can quickly search through the available data to find answers to their questions without having to re-process the same raw data. This saves time, money, and operational resources.
- Easy to Manage – When storing research in one centralized repository, your data management team will have a much easier time interacting with that specific research. For example, when engaging with cloud data warehouse solutions, your business can create specific access definitions. You can create rules that allow certain researchers, like moderators or administrators, to access all the available data. Alternatively, some employees may only need access to certain types of data. The ability to construct these rules on one centralized system will radically increase the level of security that your data has, while also making your repository easier to manage for your data teams.
While not an exhaustive list, these demonstrate just how powerful it can be to move toward a centralized method of data management. Especially with UX data, which often can span across various deployments and include a huge range of information, it’s important to move toward effective data structures as soon as possible.
How to Build a UX Research Repository
Building a UX research repository looks slightly different in every single company. Depending on the level of data centralization that has already occurred in the business, creating a centralized cloud database for your repository may seem like a large or very simple step.
In general, there are four steps that you should follow when creating a UX research repository:
- Determine What You Want – Outline what you want in your repository, including structures, purpose, and goals.
- Structure Your Respoitory – You cannot simply have a pool for all of your data to sit in. On the contrary, you should design a data system that makes sense for your business with certain locations for each type of data, be it raw, insights, facts, or opportunities.
- Configure Access – For security reasons, you should create access roles and assign them to employees.
- Maintain – Over time, you should endeavor to maintain your repository and ensure that data compliance regulations are being followed.
Across these four basic steps, any business should be able to rapidly design and bring to life a UX research repository.
Final Thoughts
UX research repositories are a fantastic way of creating a more effective way of collecting and engaging with any research data that a company generates. Whether it’s from user interactions with your website or user feedback from surveys, storing all UX information in one place gives your teams the best chance possible to engage with data and derive useful insights.
Empowered by UX insights, your business can strive to continuously hone the user experience that you offer to your customers, improving every single point of the customer journey and winning customers as you do.
