For businesses who seek to understand their users, research is essential. As I wrote in an earlier article, both qualitative and quantitative methodologies should be employed to get a full picture of user behavior. Thing is, many organizations have a demand for UX research that far exceeds the number of researchers they have.

One solution to this problem is the “democratization” of research - in which people who are not professional researchers conduct research themselves. This can include designers, product managers, developers or customer service professionals. 

The Benefits and Challenges of Democratized UX Research

One clear benefit of democratization is that more research gets done. Talking to users directly can also be eye-opening for employees who don’t normally have these conversations. They gain an increased awareness of the importance of research methodologies - for example, employing qualitative methodologies to understand the “why” of customer behavior.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to democratization is aligning teams on goals and OKRs. In addition, creating oversight, planning, training and management is essential - as is the tracking, storing and sharing of research findings gathered from a large group of people and multiple sources.

Let’s say you already have a UX research repository. Adoption went well, and the tool is being used by all of your researchers. Your organization has decided to implement a research democratization program, adding 100 people to your 10-person research team. You might consider the following:

• Will these 100 additional people contribute to the repository?
• If so, how will you onboard them?
• Will they enter their research findings directly into the repository? Or will a researcher do that?
• Will there be a review process, in which research findings are curated?

Can’t we just use our research tools to document findings and insights?

This is a tempting option, time-wise, but it may undermine the work you are trying to do. If you are building a knowledge base of UX research, are you sure that you want to create another data silo?

Think about these questions:

1. Is your tool’s search function effective?

In an earlier article, I wrote about “intelligent search” and how it’s the gold standard for search-and-find. Remember, if something isn’t findable, it doesn’t exist!

2. Will the tool safely house your research?

It can be amazingly difficult to export your information from a tool if you decide to discontinue using it. Look into this capability before you store your hard-earned research there!

3. Will your stakeholders use this tool to find research?

If you have chosen a repository tool wisely, you will have chosen something that is accessible to your research stakeholders. And if you’ve done the work of creating a self-service knowledge repository, do you really want to undermine that?

Use knowledge management tooling to protect your research assets

When you democratize research, it might be tempting to start gathering large amounts of user knowledge before you’ve set up your knowledge management system. If you do this, you run the risk of data loss - as well as potential distrust from your stakeholders.

So why exactly is Knowledge Management so important here? Let’s step back and look at a few principles that should guide your KM strategy in this instance:

• Accessibility - if your stakeholders can’t access your UX research they will feel frustrated, annoyed, and shut out. They may even begin to distrust your UX research program.
  • Solution: choose tooling that is user-friendly and allows for easy access.

• Findability - users must be able to find what they’re looking for. There is no room for sub-par search capability in your tooling - especially with advances in AI-powered intelligent search.
  • Solution: choose tooling that makes use of intelligent search.

• Organization - your research should be accurately and appropriately organized, using a tagging structure. AI can help with this too, by scanning a research document and automatically tagging it.
  • Solution: choose a tool that utilizes AI to organize/tag your content.

• Security - treat your UX research as you would any other business asset. Your tool must be able to store UX research safely and securely, using industry standard methods and data backups.
  • Solution: keep your UX research assets safe and secure.

Insights from UX research are business assets

Knowing your users is crucial for business success. Researchers collect data through surveys, observation, interviews, and so forth, that results in understanding user behavior. In turn, these user insights drive the development of products and services, and inform sales and marketing strategies.

Therefore, insights from UX research are invaluable assets, and should be treated as such.

How? By investing in knowledge management strategy and tooling that makes UX research accessible, findable and secure. Especially as your UX research program expands through democratization.