Background

When I started at Ginkgo Bioworks, a BioTech company, there was no existing repository of UX research.

The Challenge

Product Designers and previous UX Researchers had done a lot of UX research, but there was not central location where Product Managers, Software Engineers, new Product Designers, or others could go to see the results or find & use the data.

The Solution

Since I was just joining the team and didn't have heavy project work yet, I undertook the process to assess, decide, and set up a research repository for us all.

To-date our research repository has been used by 90+ employees from Product Design, Product Management, Software Engineering, Content Design/Knowledge Management, and Leadership. 100% of new research projects use it.

Part I: Assessing tools

Goals

• Understand the needs of the Product Designers / researchers, Product Managers, Engineers, and Content Writers who would be using the research repository
• See which tool would best fit those needs, while also being in-budget

Process

1. One of the designers had previously done work to gather user needs for a research repository, which I started from.
2. I made a grid of those user needs and a list of potential tools from various review sites, and filled it in based on which tools looked like they'd meet each need or not, based on each tool's website:

Grid of tools and which user needs they'd meet or not

4. Based on this, I then narrowed it down to tools that looked like they'd meet enough of those needs, and I started free trials of as many as were available. I did more detailed comparisons based on those trials.

5. Condens and Dovetail seemed the best fit for our needs, so I also invited the Product Designers, who conduct & use research, to try a free trial of those and use them for some of their real work. I gathered their feedback. The Product Design Manager and I also met with Sales Reps for both tools.

Result: The tools both seemed comparable to each other based on my and the team's trials, but Dovetail seemed more mature, better supported, and had *much* better search, so we went with that.

Part II: Designing & setting up the repository

I also took point on setting up the research repository, including information architecture and tagging schema, user access & permissions, templates, and designing & creating the homepage.

Process

Fields and Tagging Schema

1. I worked with Product Designers, Product Managers, Software Engineers, and Content Writers to gather a list of aspects they might use to search or filter research (e.g. software product, user type, date/recentness of the data, etc.). From the Product Designers (who did research) I also gather a list of common things across research projects that we wanted to keep an eye on (types of pain points, etc.). I also incorporated my own, since I'm also a user of the repository.
2. From those lists, I created an initial set of fields for each user session recording/transcript and each report/"insight" in Dovetail. I iterated a bit over time based on newly-discovered needs or structural changes in our company.

Standard tags used across projects. Some info redacted for confidentiality.

Templates

• Based on industry best practices, I worked with one other Product Designer (see her LinkedIn here) to create templates for research projects in Dovetail, including templates for scripts/session guides for usability testing and discovery interviews, as well as templates for research reports and atomic insights.

Example excerpt from usability session script template

Home page and Information Architecture

• I created an initial homepage and site organization
• Then I conducted some semi-structured interviews + usability sessions with Product Managers, Content Designers, and Engineers to investigate how they used the repository and how successful they were at finding and navigating. I collected any struggles or questions they had, and redesigned the homepage and site organization to the extent that Dovetail made possible. I also wrote internal documentation to help with things that couldn't be addressed within Dovetail itself.

Redesigned research repository homepage

Research lessons learned