research repository miro

UX Research Repository Template

Empower your organization with customer knowledge and build a centralized research hub. From UX designers to product managers, enable everyone to get insights using the Research Repository Template.

Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies

About the Research Repository Template

The Research Repository Template solves many problems around knowledge sharing and customer insights inside organizations. To break down silos between teams and build a healthy, human-centric company culture, UX researchers and designers came together and created the concept of a research hub. In this shared space, everyone can benefit from the insights and knowledge produced by UX research teams.

What is the Research Repository Template?

Put simply, the Research Repository Template contains all the information gleaned from user interviews. It serves as a database where you can look for insights and leverage decision-making. It’s also a great tool to educate your company on user research and enable teams to come up with innovative ideas based on the research findings.

The Research Repository Template also allows you to present your research with clarity, deliver insights faster and keep your report up to date, staying relevant for a longer time.

How everyone benefits from Research Repository Template

The Research Repository Template has many benefits. Above all, it helps create a company culture around research, where teams benefit from insights and make better-informed decisions. Here are a few of the pros of using repository research:

1. Connect teams around research

The Research Repository Template helps UX teams to share and advocate for UX research, connecting teams around research or even enabling them to do the research themselves, democratizing UX practices. It’s a win-win situation when research findings are used company-wide, you see strategies aligning, and results outperforming.

2. Enable teams to learn from insights

UX research teams can bring clarity to their research with a repository template and intuitively organize and track their findings. The repository in Miro acts as a database, and every team can consult and search for insights using the search bar (command+F) directly on the board. It’s also a visual way to organize your research data, providing a more guided experience for those not so familiar with UX insights.

3. Unify research across your organization

Put an end to slack pinging for data and insights! Have in one shared space your key research findings, helping to standardize and track all research in your organization, leveraging your research ops. Easily plan and conduct research across teams, and facilitate knowledge sharing with the Research Repository Template.

4. End silos

The research repository is a great way to bring awareness to leadership, involve important stakeholders in research, and give them access to valuable insights. Perfect for kickoffs, add to your project board a link to the Research Repository Template or share it with anyone leading a project that will benefit from customer insights.

Create a research hub

Setting up a research repository is not an easy task, and there are many ways of organizing and sharing research findings. Our product evangelist, Shipra Kayan, created this ready-made template keeping in mind the needs of UX research and other teams inside the organization.

The Research Repository Template allows you to organize all the information and materials related to your research in a visual, intuitive way, so that you can share it widely or consult it quickly, uncovering insights and opportunities.

The template is divided into two main sections:

Add all the project’s high-level information so UX teams and others can find research specifics inside your company. This section is divided into three sub-sections:

1. Key information

Here, you gather all the information UX teams or any other team might need to understand the research or actively participate in it.

Overview : Add info about the team and link from here to other parts of the research repository so people can easily access what interests them most.

Schedule : Use the schedule when something is in progress or if there is a problem with the research—track all projects in one shared space, to keep consistency and a great overview. To learn more details about a given project, click on the cards.

Requests : Use it as a ‘research backlog,’ giving the space for everyone to identify opportunities and start conversations around new research initiatives.

2. Process Documentation

Add any documents related to your research, including contracts and NDAs. This is a space where you can embed any file, links, and other resources you might find helpful to keep your team organized.

3. Completed Studies

This section of the research repository is where you share your research data. We advise you to use it when your research is almost complete, if not finished already. It’s where other teams can easily browse and look for what interests them.

Research study dashboard : Add high-level information, use cards to add more in-depth info, and assign them to the respective owners.

Projects : Present a summary of your research, allowing teams to view at a glance what the research is about or even add this frame to their presentations by copying and pasting it to other Miro boards.

Evergreen insights

Bring together your qualitative data, adding your personas and customer journeys. In this section, add cross-team insights and outline your focus areas and how your findings help you reach your goals.

This section is divided into:

Audiences: Add your user persona studies.

Maps: Add your customer journey maps.

Focus areas: Add your goals, related research, and steps to get there.

How do you organize users in research?

When leading or participating in user research, analyze all your UX-related frameworks and tools your team uses inside your organization. To organize users in research, opt for a framework that allows you to gather information in one shared space, so everyone in your team can access it. Consider trying using our Research Template and see if it works for you.

How do you keep track of user research?

Many teams use a research repository to keep track of user research. First, identify the inputs (everything related to planning and conducting research) and outputs (research findings and insights). When you create a research hub, it’s easier to track research findings and ongoing research, unifying your organization's UX research efforts. Use Miro’s Research Repository Template to help you build a research hub, allowing UX teams and others inside your organization to benefit from insights.

Get started with this template right now.

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Card Sorting Template

Works best for:.

Desk Research, UX Design, Brainstorming

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When you're working with others, you might encounter situations where there's too much information to handle, or you're unsure about the direction to take. In such cases, using the Cluster Analysis Template can be helpful. It allows you to group similar items together and make sense of them, whether feedback or creative ideas. This method is straightforward and provides clarity amidst confusion.

Member-only story

Democratizing research at Miro

Eduardo Gómez Ruiz

My journey to democratize research at Miro

This article aims to share the value and process I followed to enable multiple product teams to conduct and consume user research findings. I decided to write it because I found myself repeating the story of how the Miro Research team got to where we are to multiple researchers from my network. I hope you, as a UX researcher or product leader interested in conducting user research, find the process I followed to democratize research at Miro inspiring.

Why is democratizing research important?

Democratizing research is all about empowering anyone in the organization to create and consume user research insights to make more informed decisions. To do that efficiently and effectively, we leverage the researcher’s process, tools, and mindset.

There’s been a healthy debate around this topic among the UX research community.

• “ Creating an army of (non)researchers ” was my first article sharing the process I followed at Uber to train cross-functional teams to execute a research study
• “ Democratization is our Job ,” written by Bezoh Sirjani , highlighted how researchers can facilitate the inevitable contact between users and product and sales teams to be more effective

Written by Eduardo Gómez Ruiz

UX Research Lead @Miro | ex-Uber

Text to speech

• Search in Operationalising research

How to build a UX research role & practice from scratch

A UXinsight by Ori Dar (he/him)

• Operationalising research
• Research process

Becoming the first UX researcher in an organization can be challenging. In order to be successful, we need to properly define our role, and implement research practices from scratch, while understanding what to do and how to do it. The challenge becomes even bigger if that’s also your first UX research role .

In this article, I’d like to share the methodology and techniques I used in order to become the first UX researcher at my company, and how I implemented them. These tools can help you define your research role from scratch and build research processes by utilizing a research mindset that can be shared with those you work with. In the end you will find a list of the templates discussed in the article.

Apply a research mindset to your practice

As the first UX researcher, you may be wondering: Where do I start? You might be eager to run your first research project with users. Yet you might consider starting off with another research project. Apply your research mindset to define your role and share this mindset with your teams to establish the practice.

Research mindset for me includes three main things:

• Think like a researcher – challenge your assumptions, be methodical and organized
• Be aware of your initial intuition but also be critical of it
• Look for measurable proof of your ideas to help test your hypotheses

Your first UX research project: define your role

Treat this like any other research project. Taking advantage of our research mindset helps organize our goals, workflows, and desired outcomes.

Setting goals and planning ahead

Good research starts with planning and asking questions. It’s a way of inserting order into an otherwise unclear situation. And also, it’s what we do best.

• Define your goals. For me, it was to understand why am I doing this, and what value my UX research role can bring to the company. Understanding the value helps to communicate with stakeholders later on.
• Create your research plan. Start with your research questions: What are the main responsibilities of this role? Where does research fit in company workflows? How to promote user-centered and research-based deliverables? Don’t forget to outline your hypotheses.
• Consider what you’ll do next. For example, what you learn, and the findings you’ll collect can, later on, be translated into the specific job requirements and responsibilities that will help you get started as the first UX researcher.

Conducting research

While I used several methods, I would like to share two methods that, for me, provided the most valuable insights:

• Job description analysis. See what companies want, what they look for, and what skills or experience they ask for. Think broadly and try to find different companies from different domains that offer a wide range of products, both B2B and B2C. This can help see the bigger picture. I used a ‘Rainbow spreadsheet’ to organize my learnings 🌈. In it, each row represents a responsibility, skill , or requirement, and each column represents a company. This way, I ended up with a colored heatmap that highlighted key topics and recurring themes.
• In-depth interviews . Find people who you can learn from and ask them to share their experiences. What do they like or dislike, what’s hard to do vs. what’s easy to achieve, what a day in the life looks like, etc. I interviewed several UX researchers I contacted via social media to learn more about how they perceive the role, what they do, and what suggestions they have for me. It was a great experience and I learned a lot.

An unexpected outcome of my interviews was learning that I’m not alone and that everyone deals with similar issues.

Synthesizing

I placed everything I learned on the Miro board and identified the main themes that came up. These themes became my responsibilities and job description that I shared with the relevant stakeholders when I started my role. They include things such as:

• Creating diverse thinking using different research techniques
• Engage employees from all fields and on all levels by sharing research and key insights, in order to build consensus regarding our users’ voices
• Standardize a research protocol and contribute to a repository of user research tools
• Conduct research throughout all of the product phases – formative, iterative, and evaluative

Strengthen the research mindset in your teams

After defining your UX research role and aligning it with the relevant stakeholders , focus your next steps as the first UX researcher on building the practice itself. Create research workflows, enablement, and awareness.

Standardize your research process

Being the sole researcher meant I had to share knowledge and delegate responsibilities since I couldn’t be hands-on in every step of each project. This meant acting more as a research facilitator who empowers and helps others do more research more accurately .

A good starting point here is to invest in templates.

Be critical about what you find online (research mindset, remember?). Tweak it to make it your own, and act as a curator of knowledge to facilitate the right workflows. I created a Miro research template that covers all steps of the research, starting from research questions, hypotheses, choosing the appropriate methods , collecting data, and synthesizing it into insights and conclusions. It was built together with the team and we amend it according to usage and feedback.

If the steps of the research are laid out clearly, it’s easier to remember to think critically. And if the tools are right in front of us, it’s easier to use them and be more user-centered.

Align your teams around measurement goals

When we at Imperva started using the analytics tool Fullstory it created a huge spike in the amount of data we collect. In order to make sense of all of it and help the teams get aligned on their desired (user-centered) outcomes we had to organize it. To do that, I utilized Google’s HEART framework to create a predefined structure to define relevant metrics for each product in my organization, and a consistent language that everyone knows and understands.

Together with the designer, we created a dashboard for each product to track the relevant metrics for it (defined with HEART). This framework helped us organize our analytics data and create a place to track, analyze and investigate user patterns and behaviors to see how new features are accepted by our users and how they use existing ones.

Make research data accessible

Research can be done by different people on different products. This makes the data distributed and easily misplaced. Also, it’s hard to know if someone has insights on an issue close to or relevant to the one you are working on. Documentation is the way to preserve data and make it more accessible. You can document data from different perspectives:

• User feedback repository . I created the repository based on Tomer Sharon’s ‘Nuggets’ framework . A nugget is the atomic unit of research insight and consists of evidence, observation, and tags . This repository helped us group all the data together in a single place and made it easy to find user feedback that is either product-related or specific research question related. I built the repository using an Airtable template and adjusted it according to our needs. It helps prioritize research by surfacing issues that arise often. It also makes it easy to find previous insights that can be related to the current project at hand.

• Research projects repository. The second angle of documentation is documenting the projects themselves. Having a single place that stores all research projects increases visibility of research and also allows others to see if previous research can be applicable to the one they are currently conducting. The repository I created is a simple spreadsheet that includes the research topic, when it was done, key questions and findings, and links to the relevant assets such as findings, presentations, recordings, and more.

Final thoughts

By utilizing a research mindset I was able to manage being the first UX researcher at my company and handle the new responsibilities. It allowed me to increase the amount of research done, and be an advocate for user research. Being critical and methodical is what helps us perform our research role better and offer the best outcomes we can. Here are a few things that helped me during my journey:

• Work together. While doing it alone is completely possible, if you can, sync and brainstorm with others. Ask for help and feedback. Ask the community. This will help you focus your ideas and make sure they are the right ones for your problems.
• Start doing. Even if you’re not 100% sure, start doing and iterate as you go. It’s a lot easier to fine-tune something we have than to stare at a blank page.
• Start small. Work towards creating a simple habit that becomes automatic as time goes by and that helps increase the research mindset.

Here is an overview of the templates shared in this article that I created or modified with my team:

• Rainbow spreadsheet (in Google Sheets) for job description analysis
• Research planning and executing (in Miro)
• User feedback repository (in Airtable)
• Research projects repository (in Google Sheets)

Images in the article created with the help of Moshe Sabach and Sher Agami.

Cover photo by Silvia Brazzoduro on Unsplash

Get latest articles and templates from UXinsight in our monthly updates.

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About the author

Ori Dar (he/him)

Ori is a UX researcher and designer. Coming from the field of psychology, with an M.Sc. in cognitive psychology and human factors engineering, Ori believes that anything can be researched, including research itself.

Ori designed experiences for different products for a wide range of domains including banks, retail, cyber security, and more. For the past three years, Ori has been building and advancing the UX research function at Imperva. By working alongside a team of 10 amazing designers, he aims to make all design decisions more user-based.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ori-dar/

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best template for website research (url lists) and people research repository?

• 1 year ago 24 July 2023

I’m new to Miro.  Initially we are doing some research to collate relevant web urls and small info panels on individuals.  Any thoughts on a template most suited to this?  Cheers!

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7 Best UX Research Repository Tools & Software for 2024

• December 13, 2023

• Recording & Transcription
• Supports +30 languages
• AI Meeting Notes
• AI Multi-Meeting Insights
• Auto push to +5000 tools

If you’re a UX researcher, you’ll know why UX research repository tools are essential. Without them, organizing data becomes a nightmare – and user insights are lost to the void, never to be acted upon.

The best research repository software will allow you to preserve research and data for future use, while making a wide range of materials easily accessible for anyone who needs or wants to review them. The UX repository should act as your single-source-of-truth for anything related to user behaviour, personas, needs, pain points, preferences and feedback.

Well-documented and shareable insights = less frustration for user researchers!

@tldv.io We love constructive criticsm #productmanager #product #tech #productmanagement #corporatehumor #startup ♬ original sound – tldv.io – Meeting Recorder

Why Do We Need Specific UX Research Repository Tools?

Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to use a simple platform that everybody in your business can use – that includes  the technophobes (we’re looking at you, Karen). Tools like Notion allow all stakeholders to review user research without demanding they learn to navigate a complex platform. 

Keeping your UX repository simple could save you more money, time, and stress than you might first realize.

Companies with fewer than 50 employees have an average of 40 SaaS applications , while the figure for bigger companies (with more than 1,000 employees) is more like 200 tools and applications. That’s an average of $3570 spent on SaaS (Software as a Service) per employee!

To choose the best research repository tool, you should know in advance what you’ll mainly be using it for. This typically boils down to two general options:

• To provide transparency. If your goal is to be transparent with your research, sharing it among stakeholders and other colleagues, then it’s better to use a tool that is already widely used throughout the company, such as Notion, Miro, or Confluence. In this case, a more complex dedicated research repository, like Dovetail or Condens, is probably not for you. 
• To delve deeper into analysis.  If the goal of the research repository is to plumb the depths of your data, and it’ll be used only by a small team of researchers, then the limitations of widely popular tools, like Notion, are too much of a hinderance for your research. Instead, it’s advised to adopt more specialized user research tools like Dovetail or Condens.

Source: NNGroup

The Complementary Icing on the Cake

Whether you have a very broad scope, or you’re honing in on something so narrow that you need a microscope to get the fine details, tl;dv can be your best friend. It’s a remote UX research tool that makes your job a piece of cake. 

Ever wished you could go back and hear the voice of the customer again? Maybe you’ve even recorded meetings before, but rarely rewatch them because of the time-consuming effort to locate the right part and share it, not to mention the fact that most online meetings platforms take days to even let you see the recording. With tl;dv you can record all your meetings , get instant transcripts, and even timestamp and cut the video so that you can leave a hyperlink directly to the important part of your user interview.

tl;dv’s intuitive AI will provide automatic summaries at the end of each call, you’ll get highly accurate speaker recognition, and you can even create highlight reels out of a number of different clips, perfect for sharing your user research findings. It also integrates with 5,000+ different work apps , including those below.

Whichever research repository software you use, you can complement it with tl;dv , and link to your snippets of unbiased insights instantly.

So now you know why research repositories are needed, and which tool to use to enhance them, let’s get down to business, shall we? Here are the 7 best UX research repository tools for your user research .

7 UX Research Repository Tools for 2024 and Beyond

1. dovetail.

Briefly mentioned earlier, Dovetail is a data analyzing research tool that helps you create professional level research reports in minutes.

• Great for deep research among bigger user research teams that want their own space specifically for user research
• Store all materials in one place with great visualization and journey maps
• Discover research patterns in Dovetail’s powerful insights repository
• Easy to export data
• Unlimited storage for recordings, files, notes, photos, and reports of any kind
• Create professional research reports in moments
• Collaborate with multiple users and make use of flexible annotation tools
• Complex to learn so it’s not great for convincing stakeholders outside of user research
• Meetings need to be downloaded from an external recorder, then manually uploaded into Dovetail, taking up valuable time ( tl;dv has recordings and transcripts available as soon as the meeting ends and can be uploaded with a simple copy/paste)
• You must wait for the transcript to be generated, and there are no speaker tags or highlights (tl;dv’s speaker tags are added automatically and highlights are super easy to create )
• Limited file types: audio, video, and images are able to be uploaded but this may not cover all types of research
• Price: as a commercial software, Dovetail may not be affordable to everyone. tl;dv, on the other hand, fixes most of Dovetail’s cons for free…

Dovetail used to have a “permanent” free plan, but that has now gone. Instead, you can get free trials for the paid plans. This will help you get used to the software, but you’ll need to upgrade to one of their paid plans to use it more. Their Starter plan starts at $30 per month, while their Team plan will set yo back $375 per month. Their business plan, however, costs a staggering $1,800 per month or $21,600 when billed annually.

Harvard, Deliveroo, and Shopify all use Dovetail: the weight of those customer names should speak for itself. Generally, Dovetail is used by academic and government institutions, as well as product, service, design, and research agencies.

It enables you to conduct online usability tests, sharing your thoughts, insights, and expertise seamlessly. You can use Dovetail to get a leg up on your competition, helping you make sense of user patterns and empowering you to take decisive action.

Dovetail is a fine blend between being a specific research repository and being easy to learn and use. If you’re set on using a specialized UX research repository software but don’t want the steep learning curve, Dovetail might be for you. 

Having said that, Dovetail is not for everyone . Its strength is, in a way, also its biggest issue. Dovetail is so specialized toward user research prfoessionals that non-UX people are really going to struggle to adopt the platform. Unless your stakeholders are willing to put in the hours to learn how to navigate this sometimes non-intuitive software, they’re not going to derive useful insights from all that research. And that, well, kinda makes the research useless. User insights are most impactful when fed into product development, marketing and overall business strategy. Since Dovetail is not super accessible across a wider organization, any insights kept within this repository are likely to remain siloed.

Plus, we can’t summarize Dovetail without mentioning the secret black hole that sucks all your time away: you have to manually upload your user interviews. On top of that, the automated transcription takes ages to generate, and it doesn’t come with any speaker tags or options to highlight. Okay, that was actually 3 black holes. These things can cause huge delays – not to mention, it’s generally frustrating to do menial tasks for every interview. tl;dv, on the other hand, integrates smoothly into Google Meet, Zoom, and MS Teams,  then integrates your recordings smoothly into other platforms and repositories. We’re talking INSTANTLY. Plus, it’s free !

tl;dv may not be a research repository tool in and of itself, but it will make whichever tool you use 10 times easier. That’s because tl;dv integrates with Google Meet, Zoom, and MS Teams to enable you to record, transcribe and highlight the important moments during a live meeting. It makes your meeting moments instantly accessible after, so you can immediately capture and cluster the moments that matter.

For example, you want to store all the valuable insights from your user interviews on Notion or Miro? Or maybe Dovetail? No problem: the timestamps of tl;dv appear as hyperlinks, meaning you can just copy them and paste them directly into your research repository. Later on, when analyzing your research data, you can click the link to rewatch the exact moment where the user spoke the words that will help you improve your product.

Not only does it help you as a user researcher to avoid bias , it also makes it straightforward to share important and actionable insights with stakeholders and key decision makers . After all, the point of user research is to implement changes in your product or service that will benefit users, and in turn, your business. Right? So if your stakeholders can’t access your Condens repository or the research stored on Dovetail, they  can access your user interviews directly, without any hassle or fuss, via tl;dv. Let the customer do the talking.

• Free AI Integration : tl;dv utilizes top-of-the-range AI to provide summaries, notes, and automatic speaker detection.
• Free and Instant Translations : Live transcriptions in more than 25 languages for Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Meet.
• Incredible Free Plan : Unlimited free recordings of Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Meet calls.
• Easy to Use : tl;dv has an intuitive design that makes it super simple to use.
• Timestamps and Tagging Features : Timestamp your meeting highlights to quickly jump back to specific moments in the call. It also features the ability to tag colleagues at specific meeting moments so they get an email with a link straight to their inbox.
• Integrates With All Your Favorite Work Apps : Push timestamps and meeting clips directly to Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more via third-party integrations.
• Create Clips and Highlights : Scan your library and make clips and highlight reels to condense insights.
• Intuitive Library : Search your meetings library for keywords in transcripts to quickly find what you’re looking for.
• Compatibility : Not yet available for WebEx or BlueJeans.
• Hyper specific: Not suitable for other types of research beyond live user research

With a free plan that defeats most paid plans, tl;dv is available for you to try out right now. For more advanced features, there are some paid plans that you can view here .

Free Plan Features

• Unlimited recordings
• Record Google Meet, Zoom, and MS Teams calls
• Transcribe ALL calls
• Transcribe in 25+ languages
• AI summaries and notes
• Set timestamps and highlights
• Create and share clips
• Set recording automations

The paid plans offer some crucial integrations, analytics, downloadable recordings, customizable share settings and priority customer support.

Regardless of which software you utilize for your research repository, tl;dv will enhance them. It’s not advised to use tl;dv on its own as its not intended to organize large swathes of multi-file-type data, but when complemented with the right research repository tool for your business, tl;dv can work wonders on your research, cut days out of your analysis, and convert user insights into decisive action with ease.

As you can see from the hero page above, Condens is here to “supercharge your UX research analysis”. If that doesn’t tell you exactly what it does, nothing will. But how does it work? And why is it better than its competitors?

To start with, you can use just one click to analyze a research session. There’s no coding required whatsoever, making it extremely easy to use, even for all the non-tech people at the back. 

UX designers, researchers, and consultants are the likely candidates to make use of this powerful tool. If, of course, they can afford to use it.

• Automatic transcription
• Video clips and highlight reels
• Organizing evidence with affinity clusters
• Share your work with clients and stakeholders in one place for easy collaboration
• Conduct user research remotely and reach a larger and more diverse participant base
• Advanced analytics and reporting features for uncovering greater insights
• Customization is limited 
• The tool is not necessarily suited for all types of research projects
• It’s on the pricey end of the spectrum as far as UX research tools go

Unlike tl;dv, Condens does not have a free plan. However, it does have a free trial which lasts 15 days. This is enough time to play around with the tool and learn if it’s the right one for you, but then it’s commit or nothing.

The lowest plan available is the individual plan, currently sitting at 15€ per month for one person only.

Individual Plan Features

• One researcher
• 12 hours of automated transcription per month
• Analysis features
• Basic integrations
• Unlimited projects
• Unlimited sharing of findings in read-only mode
• Personal support and onboarding

The next step up in pricing is hardly a step. You may need an elevator. It leaps from 15€ to 170€, increasing the researcher count up to 3 and unlocking a few extra features. For more information, check out Condens’s pricing .

There are also Business and Enterprise plans, setting you back 400€ and 1,000€ per month respectively.

While it’s a bit on the expensive side, Condens is used by big companies such as 02, Just Eat, and Eventbrite. In other words, it’s established a reputation for being one of the best at what it does.

It’s a great tool for remote UX research, and its automatic transcriptions can come in useful, but at the end of the day, we think Condens is a bit too expensive to place near the top of the list.

After all, tl;dv offers many of the same features , including instant and automated transcriptions in more than 25 languages, video clips and highlight reels, a video library for storing user interviews, and all this is included in the free plan alone… 

Miro is a popular tool among UX researchers, despite it not being a specialized research repository tool. More accurately, Miro is a digital whiteboard platform, allowing users to collaborate visually. It’s great for creating wireframes or flow diagrams.

However, as you can see in the image above, Miro now offers a template specifically for a UX research repository. This boosts it up the list dramatically as it means you can store all your user research in a way that’s visual and easy to make sense of.

• Your entire company can adopt Miro without any issues, allowing your stakeholders to view user research first-hand
• Real-time collaboration 
• Great visualization elements and easy to do Card Sorting
• Can be used for user interviews, usability tests, and surveys
• Integrated with many top of the range apps and tools
• Great UX reserach templates
• Doesn’t work well with recordings, nor transcribe meetings (luckily, tl;dv integrates with Miro to do the hard work)
• Limited analytical features
• Not great for organizing large amounts of data 
• Can be difficult to share with stakeholders not using Miro
• Lack of research-specific features

Like Notion, Miro isn’t as expensive as dedicated research repositories. Its free plan offers enough to fully get a feel for the platform.

• Single workspace with 3 editable boards
• 2,500+ community-made templates
• Integration with over 100 apps, including Slack, Zoom, and Google Drive
• Easily bring individuals to a specific area of the board and follow what they do

To summarize, Miro is a bit like Notion in that it can be used as a UX research repository software, even if that wasn’t its original purpose or intention. 

The main downside to Miro is that it can be difficult to organize large swathes of data. If you are doing  lots of user research, you may get lost and overwhelmed using Miro. 

However, for small amounts of separate research, Miro is a powerful choice that excels because of its unrivaled ability to display information visually.

While Notion is not a specialized research repository tool, you can still use it to store, organize and share your research. In fact, if you need to share it with stakeholders, clients, or other non-researcher colleagues, it might just be the easiest option.

Notion has an extremely low learning curve and is often used in businesses anyway. By collecting your data on Notion, you can save your team money and time that they would need to pay for and learn an entirely new system.

• Your entire company can adopt Notion without any issues, allowing your stakeholders to view user research first-hand
• Flexible and can be adjusted depending on your requirements
• Real-time collaboration allows multiple team members to contribute to the research repository simultaneously
• Integrated with lots of popular tools like Google Drive and Trello
• Powerful search function that helps you find valuable insights quicker than you can say “research repository”
• Doesn’t work well with recordings, nor transcribe meetings (luckily, tl;dv integrates with Notion to do the hard work)
• Limited analytics
• Limited visualization
• Limited research-specific features that could hold you back if you require some additional code or analysis
• Limited options for exporting data outside of Notion itself (not great if your stakeholders aren’t using Notion)

Notion has a generous free trial, but it is not great for large teams. Unlike most dedicated UX research repository tools, Notion’s prices are fair, even for the higher end plans. 

• Unlimited blocks for individuals and limited block trial for teams
• Collaborative workspace
• Integrate with Slack, GitHub and more…
• 7 day page history
• Invite 10 guests
• Basic analytics

For higher limits and more features, see Notion’s other plans , including their customizable Enterprise Plan.

If your team already uses Notion then trying it out for a research repository is a no-brainer. It’ll save you a lot of money as specialized research repository software is expensive. More than that, it’ll save you time. You already know how to use it, so now you’re just giving it an extra use case. 

But what about if your company doesn’t use Notion? Depending on what they do use, Notion could still be a good option. Obviously, if they’re already using a potential documentation tool that can be repurposed into a research repository, then that would be ideal. If not, Notion is not hard to learn and it’s not going to send you in the red either.

At the end of the day, it comes down to whether or not you want to use this research repository for sharing widely amongst your colleagues, stakeholders and clients, or whether it’s simply a dedicated hidey-hole for user researchers.

Maze is an intuitive tool, designed to make the product discovery phase continuous. It’s perfect for user-centric product teams that are conducting a lot of user interviews and usability tests .

Maze encourages teams to continuously collect insights from their users throughout the entire product development cycle, maximizing a product’s potential and making it truly stand out.

It’s particularly useful for product designers and UX researchers.

• Can conduct user research and testing from anywhere in the world
• User-friendly interface makes it easy for non-researchers to conduct research and view insights
• The ability to collect and store qualitative as well as quantitative data
• Integration with other tools such as Figma and Sketch
• Limited customization options
• The analytics and reporting features could be enhanced
• Customer support could be better
• The platform is limited to remote research which may not be useful for all research projects

Like the two UX research repository tools listed above, Maze has a free plan that we highly recommend you trial before diving headfirst into the paid versions. It’s not the best free plan in the world, but it’s enough to get a simple feel for the platform.

• 1 study / month
• Up to 7 blocks

For higher limits, as well as clips, Open and Closed Card Sorting, templates and more, see Maze’s paid options .

Used by Uber, Glovo, and Rappi, Maze is a UX researcher’s dream. It’s one of the best research repository platforms available as it’s specifically designed with user research in mind. 

The fact that it’s easy to learn, easy to use, and focuses on continuous user research, makes Maze a top contender for those in need of a repository solely for user research. Teams that were hoping to use their repository as a more general documentation tool may need to search for something else.

7. Productboard

Productboard is the easiest to use UX research repository software out there. As a product management platform, Productboard helps you get the right products to market, quicker, by understanding the needs of your customers. In doing so, it helps you build priorities and structure, aligning your whole team behind an intuitive roadmap.

Productboard is ideal for product managers, especially those in computer software or information technology services .

• Easily gather and organize customer feedback
• Features for prioritizing and organizing product developmental tasks
• Collaboration tools for async and remote work teams
• Integration with other tools such as Trello and Jira
• Can be difficult to learn for newcomers
• Difficult to customize 
• The customer support can be improved
• Can be costly for small businesses

Productboard doesn’t offer a free plan, but it does offer a free trial that we highly recommend you check out if you’re interested. It lets you test out its features for 15 days, before upgrading to one of the paid plans.

If you need unlimited products, features, and roadmaps, you’ll have to fork out for one of the paid plans .

Both Microsoft and Zoom use Productboard, so it’s easy to see its importance on business strategy.

As Productboard is a little niche, there can be a learning curve for newbies. As user researchers, you should know all about learnability, but not everybody in your workplace will, and not everyone will want to learn a complex new system just for their small role.

The use of Productboard is probably best for a select team of researchers, organizing their research data in a super convenient manner.

The Best UX Research Repository For You

At the end of the day, only you know what’s best for your business. If you have a team that already uses something like Notion or Miro, then there’s no point trying to get everyone to learn something more complicated. However, if the type of research you conduct is thorough and complex, it may require a more specialized research repository. 

Hopefully, the tools on this list have helped you understand more about what your team needs and what your stakeholders are most able to access. Remember: if the stakeholders can’t see your research, it’s effectively useless.

Also remember this: whichever UX research repository you choose to use, make sure you partner it with tl;dv for instant hyperlinks to user interviews that you won’t find elsewhere.

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How to build a research repository: a step-by-step guide to getting started

Research repositories have the potential to be incredibly powerful assets for any research-driven organisation. But when it comes to building one, it can be difficult to know where to start. In this post, we provide some practical tips to define a clear vision and strategy for your repository.

Done right, research repositories have the potential to be incredibly powerful assets for any research-driven organisation. But when it comes to building one, it can be difficult to know where to start.

As a result, we see tons of teams jumping in without clearly defining upfront what they actually hope to achieve with the repository, and ending up disappointed when it doesn't deliver the results.

Aside from being frustrating and demoralising for everyone involved, building an unused repository is a waste of money, time, and opportunity.

So how can you avoid this?

In this post, we provide some practical tips to define a clear vision and strategy for your repository in order to help you maximise your chances of success.

🚀 This post is also available as a free, interactive Miro template that you can use to work through each exercise outlined below - available for download here .

Defining the end goal for your repository

To start, you need to define your vision.

Only by setting a clear vision, can you start to map out the road towards realising it.

Your vision provides something you can hold yourself accountable to - acting as a north star. As you move forward with the development and roll out of your repository, this will help guide you through important decisions like what tool to use, and who to engage with along the way.

The reality is that building a research repository should be approached like any other product - aiming for progress, over perfection with each iteration of the solution.

Starting with a very simple question like "what do we hope to accomplish with our research repository within the first 12 months?" is a great starting point.

You need to be clear on the problems that you’re looking to solve - and the desired outcomes from building your repository - before deciding on the best approach.

Building a repository is an investment, so it’s important to consider not just what you want to achieve in the next few weeks or months, but also in the longer term to ensure your repository is scalable.

Whatever the ultimate goal (or goals), capturing the answer to this question will help you to focus on outcomes over output .

🔎 How to do this in practice…

1. complete some upfront discovery.

In a previous post we discussed how to conduct some upfront discovery to help with understanding today’s biggest challenges when it comes to accessing and leveraging research insights.

⏰ You should aim to complete your upfront discovery within a couple of hours, spending 20-30 mins interviewing each stakeholder (we recommend talking with at least 5 people, both researchers and non-researchers).

2. Prioritise the problems you want to solve

Start by spending some time reviewing the current challenges your team and organisation are facing when it comes to leveraging research and insights.

You can run a simple affinity mapping exercise to highlight the common themes from your discovery and prioritise the top 1-3 problems that you’d like to solve using your repository.

💡 Example challenges might include:

Struggling to understand what research has already been conducted to-date, leading to teams repeating previous research

Looking for better ways to capture and analyse raw data e.g. user interviews

Spending lots of time packaging up research findings for wider stakeholders

Drowning in research reports and artefacts, and in need of a better way to access and leverage existing insights

Lacking engagement in research from key decision makers across the organisation

⏰ You should aim to confirm what you want to focus on solving with your repository within 45-60 mins (based on a group of up to 6 people).

3. Consider what future success looks like

Next you want to take some time to think about what success looks like one year from now, casting your mind to the future and capturing what you’d like to achieve with your repository in this time.

A helpful exercise is to imagine the headline quotes for an internal company-wide newsletter talking about the impact that your new research repository has had across the business.

The ‘ Jobs to be done ’ framework provides a helpful way to format the outputs for this activity, helping you to empathise with what the end users of your repository might expect to experience by way of outcomes.

💡 Example headlines might include:

“When starting a new research project, people are clear on the research that’s already been conducted, so that we’re not repeating previous research” Research Manager

“During a study, we’re able to quickly identify and share the key insights from our user interviews to help increase confidence around what our customers are currently struggling with” Researcher

“Our designers are able to leverage key insights when designing the solution for a new user journey or product feature, helping us to derisk our most critical design decisions” Product Design Director

“Our product roadmap is driven by customer insights, and building new features based on opinion is now a thing of the past” Head of Product

“We’ve been able to use the key research findings from our research team to help us better articulate the benefits of our product and increase the number of new deals” Sales Lead

“Our research is being referenced regularly by C-level leadership at our quarterly townhall meetings, which has helped to raise the profile of our team and the research we’re conducting” Head of Research

Ask yourself what these headlines might read and add these to the front page of a newspaper image.

You then want to discuss each of these headlines across the group and fold these into a concise vision statement for your research repository - something memorable and inspirational that you can work towards achieving.

💡Example vision statements:

‘Our research repository makes it easy for anyone at our company to access the key learnings from our research, so that key decisions across the organisation are driven by insight’

‘Our research repository acts as a single source of truth for all of our research findings, so that we’re able to query all of our existing insights from one central place’

‘Our research repository helps researchers to analyse and synthesise the data captured from user interviews, so that we’re able to accelerate the discovery of actionable insights’

‘Our research repository is used to drive collaborative research across researchers and teams, helping to eliminate data silos, foster innovation and advance knowledge across disciplines’

‘Our research repository empowers people to make a meaningful impact with their research by providing a platform that enables the translation of research findings into remarkable products for our customers’

⏰ You should aim to agree the vision for your repository within 45-60 mins (based on a group of up to 6 people).

Creating a plan to realise your vision

Having a vision alone isn't going to make your repository a success. You also need to establish a set of short-term objectives, which you can use to plan a series of activities to help you make progress towards this.

Focus your thinking around the more immediate future, and what you want to achieve within the first 3 months of building your repository.

Alongside the short-term objectives you’re going to work towards, it’s also important to consider how you’ll measure your progress, so that you can understand what’s working well, and what might require further attention. 

Agreeing a set of success metrics is key to holding yourself accountable to making a positive impact with each new iteration. This also helps you to demonstrate progress to others from as early on in the process as possible.

1. Establish 1-3 short term objectives

Take your vision statement and consider the first 1-3 results that you want to achieve within the first 3 months of working towards this.

These objectives need to be realistic and achievable given the 3 month timeframe, so that you’re able to build some momentum and set yourself up for success from the very start of the process.

💡Example objectives:

Improve how insights are defined and captured by the research team

Revisit our existing research to identify what data we want to add to our new research repository

Improve how our research findings are organised, considering how our repository might be utilised by researchers and wider teams

Initial group of champions bought-in and actively using our research repository

Improve the level of engagement with our research from wider teams and stakeholders

Capture your 3 month objectives underneath your vision, leaving space to consider the activities that you need to complete in order to realise each of these.

2. Identify how to achieve each objective

Each activity that you commit to should be something that an individual or small group of people can comfortably achieve within the first 3 months of building your repository.

Come up with some ideas for each objective and then prioritise completing the activities that will result in the biggest impact, with the least effort first.

💡Example activities:

Agree a definition for strategic and tactical insights to help with identifying the previous data that we want to add to our new research repository

Revisit the past 6 months of research and capture the data we want to add to our repository as an initial body of knowledge

Create the first draft taxonomy for our research repository, testing this with a small group of wider stakeholders

Launch the repository with an initial body of knowledge to a group of wider repository champions

Start distributing a regular round up of key insights stored in the repository

You can add your activities to a simple kanban board , ordering your ‘To do’ column with the most impactful tasks up top, and using this to track your progress and make visible who’s working on which tasks throughout the initial build of your repository.

This is something you can come back to a revisit as you move throughout the wider roll out of your repository - adding any new activities into the board and moving these through to ‘Done’ as they’re completed.

⚠️ At this stage it’s also important to call out any risks or dependencies that could derail your progress towards completing each activity, such as capacity, or requiring support from other individuals or teams.

3. Agree how you’ll measure success

Lastly, you’ll need a way to measure success as you work on the activities you’ve associated with each of your short term objectives.

We recommend choosing 1-3 metrics that you can measure and track as you move forward with everything, considering ways to capture and review the data for each of these.

⚠️ Instead of thinking of these metrics as targets, we recommend using them to measure your progress - helping you to identify any activities that aren’t going so well and might require further attention.

💡Example success metrics:

Usage metrics - Number of insights captured, Active users of the repository, Number of searches performed, Number of insights viewed and shared

User feedback - Usability feedback for your repository, User satisfaction ( CSAT ), NPS aka how likely someone is to recommend using your repository

Research impact - Number of stakeholder requests for research, Time spent responding to requests, Level of confidence, Repeatable value of research, Amount of duplicated research, Time spent onboarding new joiners

Wider impact - Mentions of your research (and repository) internally, Links to your research findings from other initiatives e.g. discovery projects, product roadmaps, Customers praising solutions that were fuelled by your research

Think about how often you want to capture and communicate this information to the rest of the team, to help motivate everyone to keep making progress.

By establishing key metrics, you can track your progress and determine whether your repository is achieving its intended goals.

⏰ You should aim to create a measurable action plan for your repository within 60-90 mins (based on a group of up to 6 people). ‍ ‍

🚀 Why not use our free, downloadable Miro template to start putting all of this into action today - available for download here .

To summarise

As with the development of any product, the cost of investing time upfront to ensure you’re building the right thing for your end users, is far lower than the cost of building the wrong thing - repositories are no different!

A well-executed research repository can be an extremely valuable asset for your organisation, but building one requires consideration and planning - and defining a clear vision and strategy upfront will help to maximise your chances of success.

It’s important to not feel pressured to nail every objective that you set in the first few weeks or months. Like any product, the further you progress, the more your strategy will evolve and shift. The most important thing is getting started with the right foundations in place, and starting to drive some real impact.

We hope this practical guide will help you to get started on building an effective research repository for your organisation. Thanks and happy researching!

‍ Work with our team of experts

At Dualo we help teams to define a clear vision and strategy for their research repository as part of the ‘Discover, plan and set goals’ module facilitated by our Dualo Academy team.  If you’re interested in learning more about how we work with teams, book a short call with us to discuss how we can support you with the development of your research repository and knowledge management process.

Nick Russell

I'm one of the Co-Founders of Dualo, passionate about research, design, product, and AI. Always open to chatting with others about these topics.

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Building a research repository? Avoid these common pitfalls

Home > Blog >

A definitive guide to the ux research repository [2024], satvik soni, december 23, 2023, ux research repository fundamentals.

Let’s start things off with a brief overview of research repositories.

We’ll discuss what a repository is.

And we’ll discuss how it can help you.

Alternatively, you can also just sign up for a free trial of Looppanel , our ah-mazing repository tool. This way, you get a guided tour and live-action experience of how a repository works!

Table of Contents

What is a user research repository, benefits of a user research repository, free user research repository templates, ux research repository tools, how to pick the right research repository tool, repository pitfalls to avoid.

A repository is just store of information. We call it a repository when we want to be fancy 💃.

A user research repository is a place to store research data, notes, and insights.

These can be accessed when needed, ideally by everyone in the organization.

A good repository would let teams across the organization find what they’re looking for on their own. This makes research insights more accessible to the right people at the right time.

A user research repository can start as nothing more than a Google doc.

It can also grow into a complex library of insights within entire applications that can do AI qualitative analysis, auto-organizing of notes, helping you speed up research.

This article will go over all of these possibilities and help you implement the ones you choose. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves!

There are 3 key benefits of building a UX research repository.

• It speeds up research ⚡
• It makes collaboration easier 🤝
• It prevents redundant research 🔁

⚡ UX Research repositories speed up research

UX Research projects start with a request for user insight.

The project is planned, user research methodologies chosen, participants recruited, user interviews conducted, raw data stored and analyzed, reports created and shared, and finally the data collected is archived somewhere.

A UX research repository speeds up every step of this process.

By definition, the user research repository acts as a storehouse of past insights & reports, along with an archive of the raw data to go back to. This store of historical data allows repositories to cut away requests that can be answered using data from previous projects.

Once the request does go through, past projects help plan the next ones better, often by giving the team a good starting point for what they already know about users.

Our AI repository tool Looppanel does live-note-taking during calls and summarizes transcripts with great accuracy. It frees one up from being dependent on some research assistant's schedule. This is one unique feature that other repository tools don't do btw, just pointing it out 😬.

A good repository also enables team members to bookmark key moments and take notes, ideally tying those with time-stamps to your recording & transcript of the call. We also let teams generate video clips of highlights, so they can share it with stakeholders easily (making you 5x faster at discovering insights & getting buy-in for them!)

Repository tools also help in qualitative analysis, with auto-organizing and affinity mapping of data .

Once that’s done, the team can collaborate on reaching insights.

And speaking of collaborations…

🤝 UX Research Repositories make collaboration easier

UX Research is a team sport. Having a user research repository allows for it to remain one.

In an ideal case, repositories should allow people outside the UXR team to contribute to the organization’s body of knowledge.

Once successfully implemented, the repository can be accessed by anyone. This makes the organization’s knowledge easier to find by those who need it the most.

Easy access to insights and data also allows for collaborative analysis.

Teams will reach diverse and unique conclusions.

Some of these will be insights that researchers could not have thought of.

Some of these will be insights other teams couldn’t have reached on their own.

Inputs from your customer success team could help your copywriters, for example. It is easier to write relevant copy if you already have a record of what the users are complaining about and what they want to hear.

Researchers can also set up frameworks that allow non-researchers to conduct their own quick research. This is amazing—the UXR team is no longer the bottleneck for conducting research! Everyone in the organization gets exposure to research.

User researchers get to see their family once in a while.

Of course this wouldn’t happen from day one and depends on the UX maturity of your organization.

Research democratization only takes place once you enter the later stages of UX maturity. A repository can help a lot with this though, by making it easy for anyone to find research info, especially non-researcher stakeholders. It's all out in the open, and stop seeming like a secret mystic ritual.

🔁 Repositories prevent redundant research

User research piles up quickly. It’s easy to lose your work in the unrelenting jungles of Google drive and Google Sheets and email chains and Miro Boards and floppy disks and pen drives and—you get the idea.

The data and/or insights hidden away in these corners might be required by other teams eventually. When that happens, researchers can hunt for them through the jungles or conduct the research again.

Having a repository makes things easier to find and prevents you from running the same research over and over and over again. Since items are centralized and searchable, you can discover the relevant information within a couple of clicks. 

Above all, it takes the guesswork out of the equation.

Your team doesn’t need to start another project with the troubling intuition that they’ve collected this data before, if only they could remember 🧐.

Some repository tools like Dovetail require you to set up a tagging taxonomy, and get everyone to tag data accurately, if you need to find stuff later. It can get very complicated.

Luckily, new-age repositories like Looppanel have Google-like search features , where you can type and question, keyword, or topic and find all the data you need within the repository.

Some teams also store participant info from previous research projects in repositories. They can then reach out to these people for future research requests. This saves the time and energy they would have spent scrambling for new participants.

Here's a repository for anyone trying to break into UX Research.

If you're just starting out with user research, you can make do a little while with DIY repositories.

They do get overwhelming and scary as information piles up, fair warning. Juggling different kinds of media, manually transcribing data, and searching for old data can be a nightmare.

And then teammate Dave could just mess up the whole thing with ugly formatting.😖

However, if budgets are non-existent and you're still figuring it out, a Notion template will do the job.

There are two User Research repository Notion templates that we are particularly fond of.

Notion’s team provides a free basic User Research template

What we like about this template:

• It’s a great starting point when just getting started with repositories
• It’s easy to populate and share for a single project
• It offers a convenient template for an actionable summary

What can be better about this template:

• As projects pile up, this template can get complicated. At that point it can have the same drawbacks as putting everything on a Drive - finding data can get tough, old research can get buried.
• The search capability across projects wouldn’t be adequate for larger organizations.
• This template is mostly useful post-research. You’ll have to separately compile data here after the study is done. Since the template requires effort post-research, it is not ideal for researchers who do not have the time to summarize their study or the will-power at the end of a long project.

You can get this User Research template here .

This excellent UX research template by Konstantin Escher.

This was originally posted to UX Collective. You can duplicate it and use it for your own team.

• This is intuitive and simple to use, even for non-researchers.
• The template offers a great level of detail. You can get an overall idea that doesn’t overwhelm you. You can then dive deep into the finer data points, if you want.
• Relevant data can be higher up on the page. Your busy teammates won’t appreciate learning about the research team before they can learn about the research.
• As was in the previous one, the search capability across projects wouldn’t be adequate for larger organizations.
• Your team should be comfortable with Notion to use this well. This is not necessarily the template’s fault, just an obstacle you’ll have to overcome.

If you’ve outgrown your DIY repository (or if you don’t want to spend time making one), there are a bunch of great repository tools available for you.

If you have a good idea of your team’s needs, deciding which tool to go for will be easier! 🫠.

Top Research Repository UX tools in 2024

You can start looking through these UX research tools first (listed in no particular order).

• Looppanel - Looppanel is an AI-powered research analysis & repository tool. It's built like a research assistant—to automate all the tedious parts of qualitative research you don't have time for. It can record and transcribe calls, take live notes, organize your data & centralize everything in one place. We may be biased but apparently the cool kids of UX Research use this tool.
• Dovetail - Dovetail is a manual user research analysis & repository tool. You can analyze, synthesize, summarize, and share your customer research on one platform. It requires tagging to make data searchable. It's quite complex to use, so we'd reccommend looking up simpler Dovetail alternatives.
• Condens - Condens is a repository tool that's basically ‘Dovetail lite’. It has similiar workflows, with fewer features and a slightly lighter price tag.
• Aurelius - Among Dovetail alternatives, Aurelius is a more old-school repository tool, for researchers to organize notes, capture insights, and analyze data.
• EnjoyHQ - EnjoyHQ is a repository platform, and is more useful for storage than analysis. It has a lot of integration options.

We've extensively researched and reviewed the best Research Repository tools in 2024. Read all about it here.

Judgement Criteria

When choosing user research tools as repositories, you should review your options based on a few decision criteria.

• Analysis 🧐 How will the tool help with your analyses? Some considerations include— Is there a storage limit? Can you create insights/notes on the fly? Does it offer high quality transcription? Do you have to tag data to find it later?
• Ease of use✌️ Is the tool easy and intuitive to use? Or is it so complex that you need to train your team to use it?
• Tech🤖 Does the tool use AI smartly? How accurate is the transcription feature (ours is 95%, best in the biz💅)? How reliable is the analysis?
• Collaboration 🤝 Does the tool improve collaboration within and across teams?  Does it allow real time collaboration on notes/insights? Can you share clips and reports across your organization, even if some teammates haven’t set up an account?
• Cost 💰 Will it be too much of a burden on the research team’s pockets?
• Privacy 🔒 Is participant data easily erasable? Is research data encrypted?
• Integrations 🔌 Will the repository work with your team’s current “stack” of tools?

There’s a ton of options out there.

Researching research repositories requires a repository.

To make an even more informed decision, ask yourself and your team these questions.

Do you need a repository?

If your organization has just started basic user research, we will recommend against investing time and/or money in a repository. Build out your basic research infrastructure (such as interview templates, research roadmaps, etc.) using trial and error to see what works for you and your organization.

Spend time advocating for research internally. 

If no one buys into your results, it doesn’t matter how nicely they’re cataloged.

You can also opt for a repository tool that's easy and simple enough for beginners to use.

What does your team need?

Is the cost of that tool with extensive tagging options justified? Do you have enough teammates to justify investing in an expensive and complicated repository tool? Is your organization mature enough to need collaboration between researchers and non-researchers?

Consider what will help your unique situation.

The shiniest tool available might overcomplicate your research flow.

Where will your research live?

If your team lives and breathes on Google Drive, they should get their research reports on Google Drive. If your repository doesn’t allow this, “nobody will ever, ever find it”, says Gregg Bernsetin , head of user research for Condé Nast.

Teams usually spend their time on Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, etc.

Ideally, your repository tool should integrate with them to reach your team where they are.

Pick a tool that is fun and easy enough to tempt your team to migrate.

You’ve shed blood, sweat, and tears on this research repository. Let’s see some reasons all your efforts can go to waste. Why do research repositories fail?

Sounds like a good way to end this article 🥰.

We interviewed design and research leaders to find out why 80% of repositories fail. Read the findings in our latest whitepaper here.

Lack of buy-in beforehand

Make a case for repositories in front of your organization. It would be pointless if you built or bought a repository for an organization that does not understand its benefits.

Getting buy-in would involve convincing multiple stakeholders. You would have to convince other teams of the benefits of collaborative research. Convince the product team that being actively involved in the repository will let them create a better product. Convince the marketing team that reading and adding insights will help them understand the customer better. Convince the sales team that repositories are the easiest way to identify the “pain points” people want to pay for.

A team that understands the purpose of implementing a repository across the organization will be more receptive during the onboarding process. Earning your buy-in within and across teams, therefore, can prevent the next pitfall as well.

Improper onboarding

Your team hates you for making them learn another tool.

You hate your team for not picking it up on their own.

To avoid this situation,, spending time and energy making sure everyone understands how to use the repository is always wise!

Your organization should be confident in their repository skills. That way, they’re more likely to use it when making decisions and add to it when they have interesting insights.

A team that struggles with the repository would try to figure things out for ten minutes (data not backed by research) before giving up and going back to their daily work.

Also make sure to stress the importance of participant privacy , especially for the non-researcher.

The wrong tools for the job

This one is obvious (and has been repeated all over the article).

A shiny repository tool with every conceivable feature might hurt your research work. Don’t go too big too soon if your organization is still tiny. Even a large organization just getting started with UX research will be turned off by complexity. It’s easy to fall into the role of a “librarian” if the repository doesn’t align with your workflow and team needs—you don’t want to spend more time curating your research than you do creating it!

There’s of course the other hand here. Work at a thousand person organization where they love UX research? You probably shouldn’t settle for a nice google sheet.

Pick the right tools for the job!

Role ambiguity

Someone from the research team should be accountable for the repository.

Building and maintaining the repository, answering questions related to the repository, onboarding new team members, ensuring that other teams are doing things correctly—these are just some of the tasks that go into a successful repository implementation.

If you are a UX research team of one, you’ll be accountable for all of this! (take a nap)

If your research team has more people, everyone should know what their job is. In the absence of clarity, you get confused team members stepping on each others’ toes.

You can also take cues from the teams at Google and Razorpay.  Read how they built good repositories here .

In Conclusion

Implement a research repository! Your research team will thank you.

Even the most basic repositories will immediately improve your research capabilities.

It's also really important to choose the right tool.

Looppanel is a research repository tool that's built for researchers by researchers, btw. It's easy to use and helps you get to insights 5x faster. You'll love it, just trust us on this.

Try Looppanel for free, and get started on your repository.

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Resources & Guides

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Moderated Usability Testing: A Tactical Guide [2024]

Recruiting users for Interviews & Usability Tests : Step-by-Step Guide

August 25, 2022

Is Your Hair on Fire? A Guide to Discovering User Problems

Looppanel automatically records your calls, transcribes them, and centralizes all your research data in one place

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Introducing Notably + Miro Integration: 3 Tips to Analyze Miro Boards with AI in Notably

15 Minute Read

“Have you heard of this new tool called Realtime Board?”

A simple question that would change the trajectory of my career. Back in 2016 when I was working as an in-house product designer, my UX Director at the time introduced me to a tool named “Realtime Board”, marking the beginning of a journey that would redefine our approach to collaboration and user research.

The potential was more than just a new place to take notes or draw journey maps. It was the beginning of a new era in real-time collaboration, where ideas could be shared and iterated on instantly with teammates, all inside of the browser.

Qualitative data synthesis at the time was still a manual and time-consuming process, involving physical sticky notes, whiteboards, or paper-based methods. This was not only labor-intensive but also limited in terms of accessibility and flexibility.

I had gotten so used to working in isolation and delayed feedback on synthesized data that I didn’t realize how much it was slowing down the research process. Suddenly with this new tool  we had real-time, immediate feedback and iterative analysis.

A more agile and responsive approach to qualitative data synthesis was here.

How whiteboarding tools redefined the status quo for synthesis

Initially, Realtime Board launched to market as a basic whiteboarding solution. However, it quickly became a staple in the user research toolkit with its ability to recreate the interactive process of arranging sticky notes in synthesis sessions.

This new way of real-time collaboration for research synthesis set a standard that would soon become the status quo. Realtime Board rebranded to Miro, and then led the charge in redefining the tools used for modern user research, particularly in remote team settings.

My personal experience with using Miro and hacking other visual design tools that allowed for spatial and creative work, ultimately inspired what would later become Notably. So it’s a proud milestone to unveil this new integration.

Notably 🤝 Miro: The only tools you need for your UX research toolkit

Many of our customers today depend on Miro for its unmatched real-time collaboration capabilities regardless of industry. Whether they are design teams brainstorming solutions, agencies engaging in client workshops, or research students coming up with new ideas.

Traditional methods of synthesis were often static; once data was arranged, reorganizing it for different perspectives or themes was cumbersome.

Miro and Notably, however, allows for fluid manipulation of data. Users can quickly group, regroup, and visually connect pieces of information. This flexibility is crucial when dealing with complex qualitative data, as it allows researchers to explore various thematic connections and patterns that might not be immediately apparent.

But while Miro offers an incredible workspace for collaboration, it presents certain limitations. Stepping back to identify trends can be challenging, and it isn’t designed as a long-term repository for research data and insights.

This is where Notably comes into play, complementing Miro to create a seamless experience.

Create your own AI-powered templates for better, faster research synthesis. Discover new customer insights from data instantly.

The top 10 things Notably shipped in 2023 and themes for 2024.

3 Tips for getting the most out of Notably + Miro

1. transform miro frames into themes in notably for analysis with ai.

Affinity Mapping is a method widely used in qualitative research to organize data into groups or themes based on their relationships. According to the Nielsen Norman Group , this method is particularly effective in UX research for grouping users' ideas, pain points, and feelings.

Frames from Miro are imported as Themes in Notably. This instantly allows researchers to visualize qualitative data in charts, making it easier to draw conclusions and generate AI-powered insights. It essentially automates and streamlines the process of identifying patterns and relationships within the data.

If you've created clusters using Frames in Miro, they will be respected as Themes in Notably, instantly organizing your Analysis board.

2. Import Tags from Miro to Notably for Enhanced Data Organization

Tagging plays a crucial role in qualitative data analysis. It’s a process of labeling data to identify key themes, patterns, and categories. The American Psychological Association highlights the importance of tagging for organizing data and facilitating the retrieval of relevant information.

Tags from Miro are imported as project tags in Notably. This feature enhances the ability to search, segment, and analyze data, providing a structured way to dive into the nuances of qualitative research.

If you tag your data in Miro, you don't need to worry about duplicating work in Notably. It will inherit any tags you applied and serve as a jumping off point for instantly generating AI Insights.

3. Utilize Miro's Color Coding in Notably for Deeper Data Interpretation

The use of color in data analysis is not just about aesthetics; it’s a powerful tool to convey additional layers of meaning. According to a study published in the Journal of Statistical Software, color coding helps in the quick identification of patterns and trends in data visualization. With the ‘Recolor’ feature in Notably, the sticky colors imported from Miro can be used to add depth and clarity to data analysis. This feature is particularly useful in making complex data sets comprehensible and engaging.

The Future of User Research: Embracing the Miro and Notably Integration

The evolution from manual, time-consuming processes to dynamic, real-time collaboration with tools like Miro and Notably has not only streamlined research but also enriched the depth of insights we can glean. They empower us to visualize, analyze, and iterate on qualitative data with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

By combining Miro's real-time canvas and Notably's AI-powered analysis features and repository capabilities marks a significant milestone in our journey towards more agile, responsive, and comprehensive research methodologies.

We’re excited to continue to build on this integration and deepen the experience of working with Miro and Notably.

Sign up for free to try the Miro Integration

You can try the Notably + Miro integration free for 7-days. Here's how it works:

• Use Miro for notes, workshops, or brainstorming sessions.
• In Notably, under ‘Analysis,’ select ‘Import Miro Board’ in a new or existing project.
• Choose a Miro board to import into Notably.
• Now your Miro data is themed, tagged, searchable & can be analyzed with Notably's AI features.

Together, Notably and Miro can become a powerful and vital pairing of tools for your organization's research needs. Schedule a demo with our team to get a walkthrough of the Miro Integration and to learn more about becoming a customer.

Meet Posty: Your AI Research Assistant for Automatic Analysis

5 Steps to turn data into insights with Notably

Give your research synthesis superpowers..

Try Teams for 7 days

Free for 1 project

Flexible Pricing for your user research needs

We automate the tedious parts of qualitative research so you're free to uncover insights and design products your customers love.

Good for small teams that want to speed up their user research. Limited platform functionalities.

No credit card required

per year forever*

5 files per month

Contributor licenses

Viewer licenses

Anonymous viewers

Live Notes via :

Call recording

Up to 40 minutes per meeting

Research backrooms

Phone calling

.csv files only

Task management :

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Research repository

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Other integrations

User roles & access control

Automated PII redaction

AI note-taker

AI auto-tagging

Automated data synthesis with AI

Automatic sentiment analysis with AI

Ask AI enhanced search

Knowledge base resources

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Custom legal reviews

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*no credit card required for sign-up

Good for startups that want to build a culture of design and research. Limited platform functionalities.

15-day trial

(5 users min, billed annually)

30 files per month

5 users minimum

Up to 1 hour per meeting

.csv, Google Forms

Figma, Miro, Confluence, Notion, Zoom, Google drive

Limited access & control

Email support

Standard SoC2 report

*pay by credit only

Good for companies with multiple teams that want to work better together. Most platform functionalities available; no custom security, PII or compliance.

Up to 2 hours per meeting

.csv, Google Forms, Pendo

Google, Microsoft

Email, chat

1 onboarding session

Good for large organizations that want to scale user research and need extra support, security and compliance. No platform limitations!

.csv, Forms, Pendo, Qualtrics

Granular level control

Up to 10,000 notes

Google, Microsoft, Okta

Email, chat, phone

Custom security questionnaire

Unlimited training & onboarding

*pay by credit or invoice

50% off for nonprofits

The work you do makes a difference in our world — and we want to make a difference in yours. Marvin offers special pricing for all registered non-profits and charity organizations.

Available only for Essentials and Standard packages. Enterprise plans don't apply. Sign up online and pay by credit card.

Questions about Pricing?

We have answers! Chat with one of our specialists today, and we'll give you a custom tour of how Marvin will work for your team.

Take it for a spin. Get in touch.

Princeton University Library

Pul launches princeton data commons research data repository.

Princeton University Library (PUL), in collaboration with the Office of the Dean for Research , and the Office of Information Technology , launched its own open data repository, Princeton Data Commons (PDC) on April 30, 2024. A multidisciplinary digital repository, PDC is designed to archive and publicly disseminate data and code that result from research by members of the Princeton University community. 

“Very often, research conducted by members of the Princeton community is publicly funded and therefore entails an explicit responsibility to share the products of the research openly with taxpayers,” said Meghan Testerman , Open Research and Scholarship Librarian and Head of Princeton Research Data Service. “This repository exists to support long-term archiving and open dissemination of any digital research product from the Princeton community, meeting funder and publisher policies, as well as open research principles.”

While many research communities have specific repositories for storing relevant research data – for example, OpenNeuro for neuroimaging data – PDC exists to fill the gaps for researchers who don’t have a “domain-specific repository.” 

Testerman added, “You can archive your data in our data repository and know that it will be well taken care of.” 

As a platform offered by the Princeton Research Data Service (PRDS), all submissions to PDC are reviewed by a team of data management experts who are focused on findability, accessibility, and long-term-preservation. PRDS also offers consultations and educational programming on data management best practices (such as preparing a data management plan and preparing data for publication) and hosts custom workshops for classes, labs, and research groups.

“The release of PDC marks a significant step forward in our institutional commitment to open data, and is an important milestone in our ongoing work to advance sustainable open sharing and publishing of data,” said Wind Cowles, the Library’s Associate Dean for Data, Research, and Teaching and former head of PRDS. “This new platform will enable us to be more agile in responding to changes in a rapidly evolving research data landscape.”   

All of PRDS’s services are available to all of Princeton’s affiliates across all disciplines and research areas. 

Before submitting to PDC, researchers should familiarize themselves with the acceptance and retention policy . The full process of getting data or code into PDC is available on the Princeton Data Commons website .   

“After months of beta testing, PDC is in a stable state right now, and we don’t have any major reforms planned for the near term,” said Matt Chandler , Lead for Research Data Infrastructure Services. “That said, our team is committed to continuous improvement of PDC for the long haul. If anyone in the Princeton community has feedback about how we can improve our systems, we’d love to hear it.”

To read more about Princeton Data Commons, visit the PDC website . Questions can be emailed to [email protected] . 

Published on July 15, 2024

Written by Brandon Johnson , Communications Strategist

Media Contact: Stephanie Oster , Publicity Manager