Creating a UX Research Insights Database

Research is a key part of product development. When I joined eporta the company wasn’t doing much in the way of research, eporta was not tapping into the potential of research. The Product Manager and I knew we had an issue and started to put a big emphasis on research, talking to our users to understand their pain points.

The more insight and collateral we gathered the more unorganised, we had become the result was notes on Miro on different boards and recordings on Google drive, if a colleague wanted to gain insight about the feedback they would have to listen to the recordings and if we wanted to extract quotes we would have to go over the recordings, this was not efficient and the problem became worse as the team began to grow, it became apparent we needed a better way to document and synthesise our research so that it is a resource for all, not just the product team.

Assessing what we have

In order to understand what was required, I needed to understand what we had in terms of research.

We had 2 main sources of feedback coming from customers:

User interviews
Feedback from the customer success team

Our user interviews were typically recorded over zoom and we wrote notes which were in Miro. We grouped the notes based on the theme of the testing but this meant that you have multiple Miro boards for all of the interviews and they got lost in amongst the other boards.

Our customer success team were great at communicating feedback from customers, they typically wrote this on a dedicated Slack channel, which worked well as everyone can see the feedback and comment on it. The problem was that as a product team we couldn’t understand the priority or big of an issue it was for our customers and how many it was an issue for.

Finding the right tool

After exploring different options like Miro, Airtable, and G-Suite, I settled on Notion because it was a tool the product team was already using for epics, user stories, the Engineering team were also using Notion to track their tasks. Using Notion meant that we could easily link to the insights using backlinks in Notion. A case study of how Typeform use Notion looked like it was exactly what we needed.

Working with stakeholders to form the requirements

I had a workshop with the VP of Product and Commercial director to understand what they needed from the insights. Together we came up with an outline of what we want the feedback to be structured. We identified that we needed to capture the following:

How many customers affected
Priority
Stage in the journey eg. activation

Standardising and improving the way we take notes for user testing interviews

Our current way of taking notes became limited and meant that you could not search through them easily. So we moved our notes over to Notion, which allowed us to link insights to our Product epics and stories. We also brought a zoom account with transcription which helped with the note-taking and to extract quotes.

Standardising our customer feedback

Feedback from our users was put in a directly Slack channel by the Commercial team, this was great as it brought issues to everyone’s attention but the problem was that there was no way to prioritise it or understand the frequency or user pain points.

I worked with the Commercial team to adapt their process and to develop a scale of severity in order to prioritise the feedback. We had agreed to bring all the customer feedback into Notion and also link to it on the Slack channel so that the rest of the business was informed.

My initial thought was to replicate Typeforms notion table and add in Priority and Stage. While this worked well for the customer feedback, I couldn’t bring in the notes from our user testing sessions without recreating them in the table, so I decided to have a dedicated table just for the customer feedback and try and find another solution to bring the two together.

Introducing…the tag database

In my research I came across this article which showed how you can create a tag database in Notion, I knew this is what we needed to bring our research together.

Themes showing the related customer feedback and user research

Once we had the database up and running we started to use it to help build upon the product strategy. The Product Managers use the database to understand the pain points of our users and to inform the Opportunity Solution Tree we used for each workstream.

3 top tips

Understand the need

Get an understanding from key stakeholders what the need is and how as a business we plan to use this resource. Once you have identified the need it will inform the solution.

Try and use existing tools

Exploring the possibilities of tools that you already use in the business helps other people in the business get on board. It also means that it’s easier to integrate insights and feedback into existing processes.

Research examples from other companies

Looking at case studies from other companies, really helped to give me ideas and form the best solution for what we needed.