Atomic Research Database

The Challenge

The problem was that user research was not being coordinated with the development cycle of the project and research findings were not being relayed to the teams in an actionable way.

As a result, product owners were finding it challenging to develop a roadmap for the product and prioritize competing features.

Research findings were being communicated through giant Google Docs research reports. However, it became clear that there were issues with this approach, such as those listed below.

The Who

My Role

The Team

Finding a Solution

Realizing that the way user research findings were being reported was causing issues, I quickly researched new approaches. My process could be broken down into the following three steps:

User Research

The client's industry was incredibly complex and multi-faceted, and as Experience Architect I was tasked with unraveling the complexity enough to help the rest of the team design a new system.

To do this, I travelled to client sites and spent hours conducting interviews, focus groups, and usability tests.

Breaking Down User Research

Leveraging the power of the Atomic Research paradigm and AirTable to reform how research was reported.

I introduced an Atomic Research paradigm and broke findings from my research at client sites down into more consumable nuggets and insights.

By keeping the reporting granularity smaller, it increased research transparency and was easier for teams to identify relevant findings and incorporate them into their work.

A Research Database

Taking Atomic Research one step further, I organized all of the research in AirTable which allowed me to create a database with a user-friendly interface.

With AirTable, I could cross link all of the research which increased transparency and also made it easy for others to filter through the research by parameters such as persona, team responsible, number of client sites with the issue, the severity of the problem, the part of the journey, or even the specific artifacts the user interacted with, just to name a few.

Research Dashboards

To make it even easier, I created dashboards for the main roles on my team which automatically pulled role relevant data from the database and presented it in easy to read graphs, tables, and summaries.

The Outcomes

Previously, without easily accessible research, the client had to prioritize features based on intuition and there was no clear definition of a definable larger, unified vison for the file product. Thus, the product was becoming fragmented and there was no roadmap for which features the teams should work on.

With my database of research findings in AirTable, I was able to help Product Owners on the project begin to develop a definition of done and a feature road map for the project. This helped reduce the chances of breaks in the users' experience as they navigated our platform.

Additionally, new user experience team members were able to more rapidly onboard onto the project and understand the end-user's needs than they had been able to do on other projects.

The Learnings

This project was a great opportunity to experiment with new software and processes. Particulary, this project took me from knowing nothing about AirTable and Atomic Research to becoming an expert in the organization. I even mentored others in how to develop their own research processes!