Closing the feedback loop

How I used a research repository to maximize my impact as a UX Research Team of One.

Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

As a Research Team of One at an early stage startup, I’ve had equal parts opportunity and challenge. One of my biggest challenges over the last year and a half has also manifested into my biggest asset: researching, establishing and maximizing my use of a research repository.

As a team of one, I was struggling to effectively organize research being done while advocating for more generative research.

There was so much to build. So much to research. I was struggling to keep track of feedback coming in from the various sources and separate it from the looming roadmap work.

18 months ago, we were doing a lot of evaluative research. It felt impactful and it was slowly but surely helping us improve our products, but I felt that familiar feeling that we still weren’t necessarily building the right things. Sure, we were validating that what we did release was successful, but what if we were solving the wrong problems? What if there was more to know?

As I worked on making user research part of the every day at my company, I also worried about how to scale this practice as the only person focused on the doing of research and the operations of research, at least for the time being. I wondered how I’d communicate all the research already done to future-me and future researchers and product teams. I was lost in a pile of Google Docs in various Drive folders, not knowing which way was up. I needed a system that helped me succeed, not one that had me continually wondering where I saved that research report.

I had a few goals for this new system:

• It must enable me to not re-do research by being able to easily search and find past data and insights in a single place
• It must be accessible to other members of the product team
• Multiple feedback sources must be fed into the same system

I wanted to be able to continue doing my job without needing to be constantly worried that all historical research knowledge was in my head or…