How do you and your teams document and archive research?
Hi Indie Hackers,
Qualitative and quantitative research... It's valuable. It's necessary. It requires a lot of work and planning. And once it's done, where does it all go? How do you share it? What if new hires want to learn about past tests? It's a redundant point of friction having to dig up all the company's past studies.
I have experienced this absolutely PAINFUL problem in the past 8 years of my design career. I have never seen or heard of a way to record, document and archive past/ongoing research efforts.
A research wiki of some sorts is the rough idea.
I know Atlassian can help resolve the aforementioned issues and Google Drive is free, but even those do seem to be utilized.
Is this a problem for other teams? If so, what steps have you taken to remediate the issue?
Would appreciate the help.
Cheers!
I come from a very different background, where research is actually reviewed, made public, and cited by follow up researchers.
I do believe that if you are experiencing pain digging up past research, is not a thing of tools, but of culture. Research, on any topic, is a lengthy task, with a lot of thinking involved, and this thinking can be easily lost. Therefore, I do believe the team should have enough time to write down and systematize the knowledge they've acquried. It's not about tools, but about working culture. If you ask your team to, for example, write reports and you give them the time to do so, it won't matter if you are using google docs, wiki, evernote, etc. the generated knowledge will be discoverable.
If you start a sort of research wiki, how do you guarantee your team will use it? Evernote, google docs, etc. etc. they are useful only if adopted, and they are adopted if people have time, and see the value of what they do. That's up to a good manager to find out how.
Regarding ongoing research, then you can manage it as any other project. If you are making decisions based on ongoing research and not on finalized research, then I would argue there's something not completely right. If you can already draw conclusions, then the research is done, at least one of the topics, it is not ongoing...
Thank you for all of the responses! I've posted this question in multiple forums and it seems like there isn't a pattern in the systems/services that people are using. I'm going to begin researching what I've heard and hopefully a winner will emerge.
Thank you again.
Evernote and trello
Are there any problem areas you've experienced that Evernote and Trello do not fulfill?