In building our product, we have spent a significant amount of time talking to user researchers to understand some of the main pain points and problems they face. One of the critical issues that we uncovered which has also been clear through some of our own experiences is, traceability.
How can you easily see what has been done before so that you can spend time focusing on untapped and uncovered insights?
There are two problems here, the first of which is not knowing that research has taken place (which is another article coming soon), the second is knowing that research has been done but realising that it is inaccessible because it is either located in personal mailboxes or personal drives. Not ideal. Both locations are highly inaccessible and private. To top it off, people working on projects may not always be able to get the full story of how a decision came to be based on the insights that were previously found.
Now consider this, a team member decides to leave and depending on how long they’ve been at the company - having to trawl through their mailbox to find previous research or properly organise their folders for other people to understand is an even bigger nightmare. Not ideal.
What about looking at it from another angle? A new user researcher joins a company. Right now, we are predominantly working from home, there isn’t a lot of in-person contact, meetings are being done remotely, on-boarding too… To ensure that people are quickly settled, they need to have the resources of where to go to find information, who to ask if there are any questions, what research has previously been done, why, who was involved, what was learnt, etc. If this information is largely inaccessible, inefficiencies start to develop.
Why start from scratch when you can use that time wisely to look at the previous insights and spend more time conducting and analysing new research?
At Pipette, we are helping people to work more efficiently and effectively by improving their traceability. Having all research projects stored in a cloud-based, central location means that previous, current and future research is not hidden away. It’s visible for the appropriate teams working on them to see. Teams will know where to go, who is involved, when are user research activities taking place, what were the insights and much, much more.
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