Barbie's dream UX research repository

The gist

Yeah sure Dovetail offers a "repository" but our researchers felt it was suffocating. They had very little confidence they could get their stakeholders in there and leveraging their insights. So I built them something custom.

My role

Coda doc architect and handy-man.

Speed

1 month to go from 0-1

Especially proud of
  • Freeing up our researchers time
  • Making significant doc usability improvements by keeping up new Coda features (ask me about the filtering experience)

Trapped knowledge

Our UX research team needed a way to let non-researchers browse through their growing collection of key findings and recommendations.

Until our repo, this information was only accessible in static presentation decks and the minds of our research team. Researchers have better things to do then respond to dozens of Slack requests saying "can you send me the link to the studies that have key findings about..." The volume of such messages increased greatly during quarterly OKR planning season. Researchers would spend a significant amount of time just helping point teams to related research, and everyone kinda had to pray they remembered everything.

Self-serve research, anyone?

We needed a proper research repository. But not the one baked into our qualitative analysis tool, Dovetail—it was too opinionated in how we organize our research. We knew we needed a custom solution. 

Enter Coda. At the end of the day, we only needed 3 tables:

  • key findings
  • recommendations
  • studies.

These would be interlinked with lookups. And through the magic of structured data, we could associate a finding to a certain page of the product, component, or flow. Not only did this meet our self-serve solution, we could also communicate how effective our research team's process was by surfacing analytics like "average time spent talking to users this quarter."

There's more to this story

🔒 But it's reserved for interviews 🔒

Invite me for an interview