Summary
This session is focused on developing an understanding of how knowledge repositories can lead to deep insights in businesses large and small. It will explore the problem space and present strategies for overcoming those problems. Some example problems knowledge repositories can solve are: missing out on valuable information that can be useful across the company due to silos; repeating research that has been conducted already and inconsistency in research reporting.
Key Insights
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Longitudinal studies like diary studies uncover how user experiences evolve with product familiarity, context, and emotion over time.
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Knowledge repositories enable connecting diverse research findings within a product and across different products or domains.
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Bridging unrelated product insights, such as insurance quotes and plane ticket purchases, reveals surprising synergies and user experience overlaps.
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Cross-team communication is greatly improved by centralized knowledge repositories that break down silos and encourage shared understanding.
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A well-designed taxonomy system with stable tags and controlled governance is critical for effective insight retrieval and consistency.
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Empathy for end users is enhanced by storytelling and visualizing journey maps using aggregated data from the repository.
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Stakeholders benefit from label-level tagging to explore high-level research themes independently while deeper dives remain researcher-led.
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Populating a knowledge repository with historical data is resource-intensive but enables richer multi-product and multi-journey analyses.
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Research ops roles, often shared across teams, are essential for managing taxonomy, data ingestion, and facilitating access to insights.
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Knowledge repositories foster serendipitous innovation by allowing users to explore various contextual and persona-based nuances within research findings.
Notable Quotes
"You can see how your tool or service exists over time with a particular persona by longitudinal studies like diary studies."
"Knowledge repositories help connect various research findings across different platforms and methodologies."
"Bridging seemingly unrelated studies can reveal relationships between different products or companies, like insurance workflows versus buying a plane ticket."
"Within companies, it’s difficult but crucial to bridge knowledge silos to find deep insights."
"Taxonomy tags should be relevant to user goals and shouldn’t be changed often without intention and governance."
"Enabling stakeholders to do their own searching at a label level helps them engage with the research without getting lost in detail."
"Populating the tool with back data is a big effort but opens opportunities to analyze a multi-product customer journey."
"Research ops is mostly responsible for maintaining the repository and taxonomy governance, often shared with design ops."
"Knowledge repositories enable storytelling that builds empathy for end users by showing their journey longitudinally."
"Innovation happens through serendipity when you explore nuances across personas, journeys, and products in these repositories."
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