Why Product Companies Need a UX Research Repository and Tips How to Build It in Dovetail

No Storage - No Impact: Why Do Product Companies Need a UX Research Repository?

Let’s use our experience as an example. Our UX Research team interviews users from different clusters about their issues or difficulties when interacting with the Parimatch platform. We also collect opinions on our latest innovations, test new features and services, and so on.

Live feedback from the interviews enables us to reach conclusions, formulate hypotheses, carry out A/B testing, and release features to production.

To gain in-depth insights from your data, you need to store it somewhere, structure it, and develop it further. You also need easy access to your insights for you and your colleagues from other departments. Distributing insights is critical: you may have crucial information, but it’s no use to anyone unless you can share it properly.

In the beginning, we stored everything in files and tables on Google Drive without a system, and it was absolute chaos:

• Some data got lost.
• We created an infinite number of files and folders.
• Sometimes the only repository for ideas was our researchers’ heads.
• Insight sharing was like links to spam in chat.

Researchers often needed to print interviews to find intersections of user concerns, so they could physically see, highlight, and capture essential points.

Checklist: Why You Need a UX Research Repository

• You never lose any ideas, and colleagues also have easy access.

  All videos, interviews, and images are stored in one place, enabling everyone to find information easily.

• Trace the evolution of research on specific topics.

  Business priorities, ideas, and problems may change, but with access to old data, you can always track the evolution or degradation of problematic research.

• Reduce repetitive research into the same issues.

  Or identify gaps in previous research for future reference.

• You're always aware of what other researchers are doing.

  In big companies, researchers often waste time, effort, and resources testing the same issues their colleagues are testing in other departments. The UX repository keeps everyone on the same page, aware of what other teams are working on.

Choosing a Tool to Create a UX Research Repository

We get insights from our interview transcripts, then describe them, corroborate the evidence in user quotes and publish them on the main page. Therefore, the main function of the repository is the orderly storage of information in one place with convenient access for all colleagues.

When choosing a tool, we considered more than ten options.

• dovetailapp.com – that part's coming next
• Notion – good tool, but not handy for tagging interviews
• https://condens.io/ – very similar to Dovetail, but more expensive
• Confluence – no way!
• Knowsi - The Consent Manager for User Research – a complex and incomprehensible tool
• https://www.airtable.com/ – advanced Excel
• Excel – problematic for storing different types of data
• aureliuslab.com – lack of convenient insight display
• https://www.productboard.com/ – more tailored to the product theme
• https://getenjoyhq.com/ – not bad, plenty of integrations with Slack and other apps, but not easy to use
• https://www.optimalworkshop.com/solutions/research – too expensive
• Reveall – too many bugs to invest in. And app team is slow at fixing bugs.
• https://userbitapp.com/ – might be fine for small projects, but tagging is much cooler in Dovetail.

Each of these tools has its strengths and weaknesses, but we settled on dovetailapp.com. Let me explain why.

Pros and Cons of Using Dovetail

Pros:

• Convenient interview tagging – by adding interview transcripts and uploading a video file, you can turn on the transcription function, and the app will give interviews in text. You can hang an unlimited number of tags on the text, divided into internal tags for a single study and external tags for all the studies in the repository.
• A search bar that allows you to find all the content about any research topic or content type. The main page, with insights distributed into different sections, is very convenient for dividing, structuring, and simplifying a search. You can configure each branch to search for research, insights, and other materials. For example, customizing the homepage in this way helps highlight insights for sharing.
• Tag charts – after hanging tags, the app can distribute them into a chart that you can download and share in image format. People tab – you can save the contacts of respondents you’d like to collaborate with more than once. You can also structure them, add them to different audience segments, and so on.
• The stories – researchers can combine several findings into one extensive article, add tags to it, support it with graphs and images for proper distribution And the main plus is the simplicity of the tool: thanks to the user-friendly interface, beginners understand how to use Dovetail in minutes.

Cons:

• The transcription of an interview in Russian that we added recently did not work very well. The app can recognize the voice and transform it into text, but at the slightest change in timbre, or if several people speak at once, the text comes out with errors.
• The project structure is rather primitive. There are only two levels: a folder with projects and a list of the projects in it. Sometimes, the connections can go much deeper than one topic and a list of related studies. It would be great if project sorting were more versatile: with links between more categories and the possibility of creating subcategories.

Setting Up a Repository in Dovetail and Creating the First Project

Create a home page

First, Dovetail takes you to a home page that you can customize to suit your needs. Here, you can use search blocks, write text descriptions, add cards, and display top insights. This page is like the site's main page – your colleagues will come here first, so you need to set up clear navigation to help everyone find what they are looking for.

To begin with, we recommend highlighting the types of data for combining subsequent projects – these can be different business areas, product divisions by OS type, product names, etc.

Search blocks are suitable for grouping projects, which will automatically group by content type, insights, projects, articles, notes, tags, user quotes, etc. You can add similar research topics and then manually add new projects to the block.

For example, on the home page, in addition to the main business goals, we highlighted a "bank of ideas for product improvement," where researchers wrote down their ideas after surveys and interviews.

For a more compact display, you can minimize or expand the insights panel.

Create a project page

All information about the project is collected here, which gives everyone involved a complete understanding of the work done. As mentioned earlier, you can group projects by type of task or business goals and display them in search blocks on the repository home page. Let's have a quick overview of the kind of information we’re using in our projects.

Organizational information on the project:

• date
• format
• number of respondents
• selection criteria
• research crew
• links to additional
• materials: design, insights, conclusions meeting schedule

Comprehensive information on the project:

• research objectives
• tasks
• hypotheses
• interview script – introductory part, interview plan, list of questions

Load data and add tags

After uploading the interviews with transcripts to DATA, we proceed to add tags. Until the interview is fully transcribed, it is difficult to say how many tags will be in the end, so we create them on the fly. Select the quote → click the Find or Create tag → write in the name (for example, "Bug"), and Dovetail will highlight the tag in color. You can then use it again by selecting it from the tag list.

To add external tags to the project, click the Extensions field and check the Extension Tags folder. That's it: external tags have been added and will be displayed along with internal tags. Extension tags are convenient because you won’t need to waste time duplicating the same tags in the future.

Let’s add insights if we have any

INSIGHTS → New insight → Create. In the insight card, you can describe the problem in more detail and attach a screenshot or a quote from the respondent.

Done!

Congratulations, you have filled your first research project, and now you can share it with your colleagues. And this is just one of the use cases for Dovetail. In fact, the functionality of the app is wider and has several opportunities for a variety of UX Research activities.

How We Use our UX Research Repository for Business Development

As Parimatch Tech is an international company, we have expanded the storage for partners from different regions of operation. Colleagues from other areas research user experiences in other countries, which helps everyone find common product problems and intersections. Also, if projects are repeated, teams do not waste resources on topics already researched.

Product managers and product designers are now the most frequent users of the UX research repository. We also collect presentations and insights from the Business Intelligence department, which we conveniently organize, store, and redistribute for product tasks. The User Research department can easily add important information, as can Analytics, Support, Products, and anyone else who collects user feedback about the product.

The UX repository makes it easier for colleagues to use research results for product improvements. Insights, feedback, hypotheses, ideas – all in one place and accessible to everyone in the company.

If you intend to create a UX department, you’ll very likely need to create a repository as well, so don’t leave it too late because, if you’ve already collected loads of data, it’ll be difficult to structure everything without considerable losses. And we don’t want you to make the same mistake we did!