Day 2 Session Notes–Stronger Together: Lessons Learned from UX Research Ops

— Thank you and welcome to talk and tuning in

— Emily: Background in research as ethnographer for many years and became archivist and know knowledge management in UX

— Maria: CEO and COO and working at intersection of DesignOps and ops support each other effectively and help other companies build sustainable operational capacity

— Both live in Front Range of Colorado and met at in-person UX event and started talking about knowledge management

• Overview and interest in topic and lessons learned in research operations and opportunities for UX ops and what future look like

— Common goals and challenges across ops

• Communication: Often have to decide who needs what level of detail for different people
• Collaboration: Who to work with
• Process: Efficient while navigating shifting contexts of research and design
• Tooling: How to leverage for best results
• Accountability: More today
• Knowledge Management: Knowledge standards for research output

— You are a knowledge steward, whether you think you are or not

— Two types of knowledge

• Explicit Knowledge, what can be codified
• Implicit Knowledge, skills people have and carry with them

— Two types of explicit knowledge

• Static: Don’t change often but easily referenced
• Dynamic: Type of knowledge that evolves frequently and different information types or asset types

— Helps as we need different types of solution for types of knowledge

— A quick overview of the evolution of the research repository

• From perspective having worked in field since 2021

— Awareness:

• Repositories have become front of mind, and research we have done in past

— Tools:

• UX specific repository tools like EnjoyHQ and Aurelius to manage knowledge base

— Stakeholders:

• UX specific repositories helped organize research, but visibility still was challenge, with limited stakeholder adoption

— Unease:

• Unease around repositories and if they helped overall mission

— Next-Gen Tooling:

• Tools become more user friendly with AI enhancements and more user friendly UI

— What’s Next

• How can repositories de-silo UX work and achieve larger goals

— From 2021 to present worked with a few companies and research repositories

• Lessons applicable to today

— Don’t decide on solution before you understand problem space

• All teams I worked with on knowledge management recognize things were more complex than what team realized
• Overlapped with communication problems

— We need to practice UX we preach, in how processes developed alongside with team, and UXR teams are often choosing a tool before thinking of end-users and stakeholders

• Because of time constraints, often had problem where repositories were only for researchers and not stakeholders
  • So these repositories often failed

— Lesson 3: Separate goal of asset organization, versus insight sharing

• Without skillset, people think tool will solve problems, but if teams didn’t dive deeply into tooling goals
  • Two goals are conflated together and strategy that didn’t work well

— Not all learnings are captured and reviewing what was going into research repositories

• Reports don’t capture everything and risk of fallen fruit of lost insights that weren’t or couldn’t be captured

— Lesson 5: Repository wasn’t solution, but knowledge management was

• Librarians and archivists have been doing this task for many years
• Archivists evaluate whole collection of rare material, describe it, and evaluate significance of it, and a system to organize it

— Each step along way, in service of access to material

— Our takeaways

• Need for strategic repository planning, to prevent siloed UX practice
• Design and research knowledge are not treated as business assets

 

— We’ll do a deep dive into what assets look like and framing UX assets as business assets

• Looking at opportunities for improving research and design knowledge management

— UXers produce outputs for end product and feel value only recognized as end product itself

• Start with what UXers produce as business asset
  • Valuable resource used to run the business

— Customer data and software and UX assets and connection between how they roll up, and research insights and templates and workflow

• Many key outputs are valuable resources that contribute to business success
  • This perspective changes on how we can use them

— So how to manage knowledge?

• Different knowledge requires different types of KM solutions

— UX assets require own specific information management solution, of using assets for business products and services

• In information management system, visibility across all assets in system and direct traceability and properties for using assets

— Next opportunity for meaningful connections for different types of knowledge to get things we need and stronger scaffolding

• Connective tissue and taxonomies and contextual and relational schemas

— UX assets as findable and managing assets themselves, through content organizing structures, and connect knowledge types together

— We can then produce design intelligence with how to analyze design data, and produce actionable information to make informed business decisions

• Missing layer of business intelligence function

— What does design intelligence do?

• Better transparency and traceability and track assets across organization
• Opportunities for cost reductions and manage compliance and reporting
• Tool for scaling UX practice and any kind of ebb and flow

— Different roles need different slices of information and context from Design Intelligence

• VP of design needs specific info compared to an individual contributor

— Success requires intelligence for all roles and stakeholders in UX process

— To take advantage of opportunities, need an integrated UXOps model for BusinessOps and ProductOps

• Shouldn’t be contributing to silos of information

— Create joint task force and collaboration spaces, and maintaining connective tissue

• Keep tool and connective tissue accurate, so business process automation can help a lot

— Need to recognize learnings discussed

— Lessons learned

• Practice UXR internally and be clear on goals and requirements of a repository

— Opportunities

• UX assets are business assets and manage UX knowledge and assets
• Enable design intelligence and support multiple use cases
• Have DesignOps and ReOps join forces

— Reframe value proposition for practice of UX for better and more intelligent tooling

• Integrate operations and successful tri-track delivery

— Knowledge stewardship and shared responsibility

— Knowledge as visible, organized, and accessible

— End with a few visuals to bring things together and continuous research going into continuous design and development

• Left is demonstrating and different UX discipline areas and aligning with DevOps and working with ProductOps

— Adopt and evangelize delivery model

— VP of design rolled out unified approach and what mockup of what intelligence solution could look like for a VP of design

• Drill into more info for specific products at high-level view of assets across functional area
• Also showing heat-maps across different assets

— Assigned work related to functional area, can see team assignments

• Sense of mess and sprawl across ecosystem and arms around solving problem
• Use tool like this today, and underpinning of it for different dashboards

— Let’s end with simple image of a tree with lots of knowledge apples on it, and seeing it as visible and organized

— Thank you all, and hope it gave pivotal assignment for role of UX strategy to elevate our practice together

Q&A

1. Are design intelligence and design intelligence management singular items or should each function involve some kind of business intelligence function such as finance, marketing?
   1. Other parts of business have built-in business intelligence tooling in place, but relatively new for UX to include
      1. Business intelligence missing our pierce of design intelligence
2. What is ROI of doing this?
   1. First say that yes, companies are more willing to throw money at tool versus expertise
   2. Find knowledge eco-systems first and then build upon that
   3. In terms of ROI for knowledge management— it just takes start-up time
      1. We do search and find for items multiple times a day
      2. Concept of ROI is something in field, but practices of BI and KM have established ROI, so we need to bring it to our part of organization
      3. All about maturity arc, and if org is ready to take challenge of KM on
3. Have you hit resistance from design side connecting to business assets?
   1. Yes, but only in sense that job was something new, but using the tool resolves the concerns
   2. Requires as mindset shift to get into business asset frame of mind