Summary
Design Ops and Research Ops teams are essential to design and research, providing strategic perspective as they solve problems and remove blockers. In this session, we review the shared functions of these two teams, focusing on Knowledge Management. We will talk about the rise and fall of research repositories in the ReOps space, outline the lessons learned, and present a way forward: a knowledge management system for both Design and Research - created and managed by Ops.
Key Insights
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Effective knowledge management requires differentiating between static explicit and dynamic explicit knowledge.
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Repositories alone do not solve UX knowledge challenges; principles from library science offer essential guidance.
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Separating the goals of asset organization and insight sharing prevents conflated, ineffective strategies.
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Reframing UX outputs as business assets shifts how organizations manage, organize, and value them.
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Design information management systems enable traceability and connections between assets to drive business decisions.
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Design intelligence adds a missing layer to business intelligence by providing actionable insights from UX data.
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Different stakeholders require tailored views and context from UX knowledge systems, from VPs to individual contributors.
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Integrated, scalable UX ops that combine research and design operations align better with product and business operations.
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Building shared taxonomies and connective tissue is critical to making UX assets findable and useful.
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Human expertise is essential alongside technology in building successful knowledge management ecosystems.
Notable Quotes
"Don’t decide on the solution before you understand the problem space."
"UX research repositories were trying to do what librarians and archivists have been doing for hundreds of years."
"Many key outputs we create in UX are actually valuable resources that generate revenue and contribute to business success."
"The repository isn’t the solution to your problem—knowledge management is."
"We need to build stronger scaffolding or connective tissue—shared taxonomies and relational schemas."
"Design intelligence is the layer that sits on top of the design information management system to produce actionable information."
"Different roles need different slices of information and types of context from UX knowledge systems."
"We’re currently contributing to the siloing of information by how we organize ourselves."
"Business intelligence exists in many functions, but design intelligence is often missing."
"As soon as teams start using these tools, they often see how much easier it makes their job—that resistance usually goes away."
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