RETAINING THE VALUE OF USER RESEARCH

Background. User research is resource intensive both in terms of time and expense but the life of the findings is often short-lived. Because reports typically end up in folder that no one accesses after the initial readout, product teams and business stakeholders may fail to extract all the value, or understand and empathize with users across a project. This makes research artifacts seem ephemeral and reduces the value of the research effort. Ultimately the process may fail to fully support a user-centered design strategy.

Solution. Working closely with a project lead, I used task workflows and agile dev stories as a springboard to create an interactive, relational, database that allows all project stakeholders to view relevant user research findings at anytime during the course of a project.

Besides surfacing workflow-related research, the database allows stakeholders and consumers to search for specific types of research, tags and categories, and other search parameters. The result is a flexible and robust research repository that provides information to stakeholders when they need it.