When gaining a competitive advantage depends on the speed of reaching product-to-market fit, spending time searching through endless reports of outdated content is not an option. Yet, far too many companies rely on reports that aren’t searchable, actionable, or shareable without sending excessive and easily lost emails back and forth.

Worse, since the feedback loop is continuous, much of the research is outdated long before you’ve had time to clear out redundant information. People can only retain so much information from the feedback that you’re already paying for. UX research repositories make sure you’re enveloping all the B2B market research into your product prototyping and getting the most out of your resource. This means that all of your slide decks, reports, screen shares from users interacting with your website and products, audio, and more, are all in one location with tagged data points for easier reporting.

In this article, we’ll cover the many benefits of a repository as part of your B2B Market Research, what the process is, and how to make a research repository that’s intuitive enough to give context around your research and maintain accuracy automatically.

Benefits of having a UX research repository

Continuous B2B market research is essential in 2021. According to Chris Jacob, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Salesforce, “Between 45 percent and 50 percent of global marketing leaders, regardless of region and industry, said their marketing completely changed as a result of the pandemic,”. This data is critical to having valuable KPI’s when looking to grow any business. You’re running a continuous feedback loop, but pushing that research to stakeholders or various members of the team often means spending a lot of time sifting through data and creating reports. A user research repository can solve that, and more. Here’s a look at some of the benefits of a repository:

Easier and faster onboarding for user researchers and end-users

Every time you add someone to a project when conducting B2B market research, whether they’ve worked in your company for a long time or are a new employee, they’re going to be overwhelmed by the number of insights and details.

No one wants to spend all their time shifting through shared folders, spreadsheets, taking notes on the most important details, and questioning their coworkers. It’s nearly impossible to avoid, but it is possible to make onboarding easier by storing all vital and contextual data in a central location that all members of the team can access- a research repository.

Want to make it even easier?

Organize it into a roadmap, with a “start here” folder that contains everything essential to understanding the project, also access further Insights here to make this process easier.

Sharing with product development stakeholders

If your research team is acting as the gatekeepers to research, with only their hands on the insights until they’re ready to pass it on, your company is operating with siloed departments- and it’s hurting your bottom line. Sales and marketing teams and even customer service and engineering can benefit from user experience transparency. But it’s particularly important that your stakeholders feel empowered to look into the data and consume it at their own pace.

Say someone on a product team has a convo with a stakeholder, then sends them an invoice a month later. There could be a lot of back and forth, reporting and presentation, between them before they even reach that point.

A research repository gives them access to accurate information instantly, and cuts that back and forth time significantly.

Speeding up the user research and design process

Having everything in one place may sound the same as shifting through one report after another, but there are a few differences.

First, having all of your data in a central location means you can trace it back, see the latest data as it comes in, and build context around answers.

Second, if it’s an intuitive online repository, there are typically integrations and project management systems, such as:

Global tags
Automatic transcripts
User profiles
Automatic report generation that’ll use the latest data

Not to mention, a repository is often more scalable because they offer templates for surveys and questionnaires, interviews, usability tests, focus groups and panels, and other common types of research methods you use.

Data filtering means you can segment or structure the data any way you want and share these important research insights with the right people- drastically speeding up your development process.

Highlight very specific evidence from your research, with context

Seeing answers from a survey, watching end-user screen captures, listening to audio… you could spend months or even years wading through that content and identifying the most vital details.

Or, you could use UX research tools that turn video and audio into transcripts and automatically tag specific keywords.

Online repositories make it easy to build cumulative knowledge about your end-user, rather than relying simply on trending answers from one panel or survey.

How to build a UX research repository

If you’re going to build a user research repository, there are a few things to consider beforehand, such as:

Whether you’ll use a separate project management tool, or use the same tool used throughout data analysis and archiving
What qualitative and quantitative data points are the most important to access
Who will have access to the repository
How you’ll maintain it to ensure it always has the most up to date user insights

Full transparency with all of your stakeholders and internal departments can foster trust and implementation across your company- remember, user insights are helpful with messaging everywhere. But that doesn’t mean you have to include every detail.

The typical process for building a solid repository for a B2B market research process looks like this:

Pool all resources and user insights into one location
Remove redundancies and irrelevant data, and tag everything you can to make it easier to find important details later
Group data by their tags and categories to make it easier to spot trends and patterns
Set a policy for removing out of date data
Add the UX repository to your company’s workflows and development lifecycle

You may even consider building a repository checklist. Without it, the repository might not be as efficient.

Using B2B market research tools as your research repository

Most market research or UX research tools include some sort of repository or tagging system, automatic trend reporting, and other data management features.

If you’re looking for an online intuitive repository option, make sure it meets these criteria:

It’s comprehensive, meaning it does more than keep all of your data in one place
It allows you to connect to other departments for team collaboration, and share with stakeholders
It automates reporting, transcripts, trends, invoices, and other features that are important to your research methods and processes
It features advanced analytics that gives you more than just trend reports or answers to a single survey. Your repository should show how all the data works together.
It’s scalable. If you can’t add users, data, researchers, or more user tests, then it will only suit you for the time being

While most tools include some of these features, it’s much harder to find one that fits all of the above.

Vancery is a research repository. Not only will our market research and data-sharing platform store all of your data in one central location, but we make it easy to organize and integrate that data into your workflows. When you create a folder, you can add user profiles, transcripts, screen shares, and make comments and requests that can be seen by your research team, stakeholders, and enter teams.