I spent a few months introducing my fellow product designers to a new way of approaching user research. I onboarded the design team onto a new tool, created a research process for designers to follow and worked with others to level up SiteMinder’s ResearchOps process.

The problem

Conducting user research is an important part of the product development and design process. And while product designers are familiar with conducting, analysing and sharing research insights for a project, we found that the methods for storing and reusing research across teams left much to be improved.

Because designers stored their raw data and insights in a variety of personal folders, Figjam boards and Google drive, over time we experienced two main problems:

  • the pain of lost research
  • lack of visibility of what other teams were doing

We found ourselves conducting repeated research efforts rather than look internally to reuse existing relevant insights from other teams and from designers who had left.

Introducing a user insights repository

I had worked on building a user insights repository in a past role. This gave me the confidence to lead the design team in establishing a research repository for the SiteMinder design team. The goal was to complement our existing research toolset, but standardise the way our designers search, analyse (via tagging), playback and store their research.

The outcome: Levelling up ResearchOps

Over a few months, it became clear that although our designers could see the value of an insights repository, they found it challenging working with this new tool.

I worked with a small team to simplify the end-to-end research process, and create easy-to-follow guidelines and templates to ensure the continued adoption of our insights repository.