Knowledge management is more important than your repository
After having helped several organizations build/implement UX research repositories, I have come to realize something. “The repository” isn’t the key to elevating UX research — knowledge management is.
When I come into an organization planning a research repository, I’m an ethnographer. I talk to people about how they do research — their process and their pain points. I look at research outputs: reports, slide decks, artifacts. I put on my librarian hat and evaluate how research is stored, accessed and shared.
Here is what I almost always find:
Tacit knowledge isn’t being captured
Knowledge isn’t curated
People don’t talk about their tooling
Teams aren’t communicating well
Why are these things important?
- Tacit knowledge — this is the vast majority of knowledge at any organization — the knowledge that resides “in people’s heads”. For user researchers, tapping into this knowledge asset is crucial. Everything that researchers learn about their users isn’t always captured in reports.
- Curation — don’t be tempted to “throw everything into the repository”. If a study didn’t go well (for whatever reason), or the insights were faulty, you could put it into a “parking lot” of sorts. Better yet, talk about why it didn’t go well, and communicate these learnings.
- Tooling — researchers use a lot of tools. But they usually don’t talk about how to use them. This results in what I’ll call “knowledge scatter”. As a team, decide on what tools should (and should not) be used for. I’ve seen many research findings get lost in the wilds of Slack.
- Communication — ok, this isn’t really “knowledge management” per se. But as we all know, organizational structures don’t tend to lend themselves to good communication between teams doing research. Teams are often divided by product, line of business, or region, which leads to lost opportunities when researchers on different teams confront the same questions.
Addressing knowledge management challenges will grow and elevate your UX research practice. The good news is that you can address them now — whether you have a repository, are planning one, or can’t create one just yet.
