UXRS October 2021 - UX Research Repository Tips and Tricks: A Panel Discussion

About the panelists:

Matthew Duignan, Principal Research Manager at Microsoft, leads the HITS team at Microsoft. HITS is Microsoft’s Human Insight Tracking System, an internal research library that democratizes insight for researchers and product teams alike. His work on HITS is informed by his PhD research into music production interfaces, complex information visualization systems, and years of leading large UX research teams at Microsoft.

Lorie Whitaker started her professional life teaching kids and fellow teachers how to use badly designed software. This made her acutely aware of how bad design affected people’s ability to achieve their goals. In an effort to reduce bad design decisions, she obtained a Masters Degree in Human Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle and has been in UX Research for over 14 years. She is currently a Staff (Principal) Researcher at Okta where she splits her time between conducting generative research and mentors designers and Product Managers in user research best practices. In 2019, she co-founded UX Research and Strategy, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that is focused on educating people about UX research methods and ways to strategically use the results.

Jared Forney is a Staff UX Researcher at Okta in San Francisco, CA and has a MS from Indiana University's Human Computer Interaction/Design program. Currently, he's focused on Research Ops: how to enable the product research team to collect timely, effective, and durable insights from their customers to build better experiences. Prior to Okta, he worked as a researcher in the fintech industry. Jared fundamentally believes design is a conversation, and that everyone should feel empowered to contribute to better design through an open dialogue.

[chrislferrell]

This is a fantastic resource, and a wonderful exploration of research repositories from the simple to the complex. Context of use, needs assessment, company culture, portability, measure of impact, and other finer threads to support anyone needing to better articulate the need for - or to caution against the endeavor of creating a repository.