Does this sound familiar?
You did a user interview a few weeks ago. Your customer said something really interesting that you’re trying to remember now, exactly what she had said.
You recorded the interview but you can’t remember where you put it.
You’re looking everywhere.
Whew, you finally found it! Now, you’re rewatching the interview trying to find that little piece of feedback to jog your memory.
You don’t want to watch the whole thing - you have so much you need to get done today. But, you can’t remember exactly where in the interview she talked about this feature.
So, you slowly skip ahead. Ugh, where is it? Did you skip it?
You rewatch the interview skipping less.
Finally, you find it!
Now you watch, pause, type what she said and then unpause watch a little more, pause and type until finally you have her feedback recorded.
What was her name? Skip back to the first when she introduced herself.
Great, now you can share this with your boss.
Whew, that was not easy or fast.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Let me show you a better way.
A much, much better way.
The power of a User Research Repository
Imagine you just ran a series of user of interviews.
All were recorded.
All were uploaded to your shared user research repository.
Everyone on your team has access to it, so even if they weren’t able to attend the interview they can watch it, tag interesting parts, and pull out insights.
You notice a lot of your customers are mentioning problems they’re having when onboarding.
You go to the onboarding tag and see there are 7 different customers explaining in their own words the issues they’re having with onboarding.
You share this with your colleagues and start brainstorming solutions.
Within just a few minutes you were able to take action on a clear user problem.
That’s the power of a user research repository.
So, what exactly is it?
At a high level, you can think of it like a dropbox or google drive but specifically built for user research.
It’s a centralized location for all your user research data: user interviews, surveys, results, notes, insights, etc.
Everyone on your team has access so it can be incredibly collaborative.
If you haven’t used one before and you do any sort of user research, it is an absolute game-changer.
Let me get into the details so you can understand how it’s so powerful.
Store everything related to your customers experience
Have you heard organizational guru’s say “everything should have a home”.
This is true for your user research as well.
It should have a home.
That home is called a research repository that all your colleagues can contribute to.
Just like getting your home clean and organized, it feels so good to know all your user research is in one place. When you need it you know exactly where it’s at.
You are no longer frantically looking everywhere for that user interview or note you took or idea you had when talking to that customer.
Finding specific user feedback
Now that everything is in one centralized location your user research repository should have three fundamental key features:
- Video transcriptions
- Search
- Tagging
Let me walk you through why these three features are so powerful.
Let’s start with video transcriptions.
When you have a user interview that you upload to your research repository and it is automatically transcribed it is now searchable and taggable.
No longer watching the video, pausing, typing, playing again, pausing, typing, etc.
No longer.
Now the whole video is transcribed for you.
Because the video is now is in text format you can search for any part of it.
Who talked about onboarding? Just search onboarding and see which customers mentioned it.
Want to know about a specific feature? Just search and see who brought it up.
The other feature that makes finding insights so fast and easy is tagging.
There’s a lot of different approaches to tagging and you can take the super easy fast way or the very thorough way. Whichever way you go, you can get a ton of value from tagging.
Tags allow you to pull together ideas, insights, and common themes across different interviews.
Do you want to know what your customers said about their onboarding experience? Someone tagged 7 different interviews with onboarding and in less than 5 minutes you can watch 7 different customers explain in their own words their experience onboarding.
That brings up the next hugely valuable part of a research repository: collaboration.
Invite everyone on your team
You’ve heard the phrase many hands make easy work.
This is true for user research as well.
You might have run a bunch of user interviews. But, you can ask different members on your team to go through and tag one interview each.
Everyone benefits by doing this.
Not only does a shared repository allow for teams to work together on user research, it also makes it easy to share highlights of interviews, interesting insights, themes you’re noticing, etc.
Leadership and stakeholders also get insight and visibility into your work.
This leads me to my next point…
Increased visibility
By having a centralized place where all your user research lives it becomes more discoverable to others.
This may sound simple but this one aspect of a research repository can be hugely powerful. Because people can start to see your work, you can make a greater impact and receive more recognition for the work you’re already doing.
People are simply now seeing it.
It’s powerful. Trust me.
Get started today
A research repository is a centralized location for storing all user research data such as user interviews, surveys, results, notes, and insights.
It is searchable and taggable, making it easy to find specific feedback.
Additionally, it allows you to:
- collaborate
- get increased visibility
- stay organized
A user research repository is a game-changer for anyone who conducts user research.
Sign up here to see first hand what Empathetic’s research repository looks like, how it works, and how it can help your organization to learn from your customers.
