How I built a research repository that highlighted value, tracked progress, and saved time for a client engagement project
🌸 By Sanjana Padmanabhan
In companies that are not familiar with the value of UX research, demonstrating its impact can be challenging. This becomes critical when the design team needs to justify research hours or prove why investing in research is worthwhile. So, when my manager asked me to address this challenge for our team, I created a research repository—a centralized space to organize all research insights, progress, and links. Below, I have shown a snippet of the repository created.
The Primary Goal: To make research accessible and relevant to stakeholders outside the design team.
To achieve this, I ensured that it answered two key questions:
These answers can be found in the repository at a glance by looking at the Objective column and the documents linked in the Findings & Impact column.
In fast-paced organizations running multiple parallel projects, delays often stem from dependencies on others. A project might show as "Ongoing," but this status can mislead the reader into thinking that the research is taking too long. To avoid such misunderstandings, I added two critical columns: Key Actions Completed and Current Stage. These provide clarity on progress made and highlight external dependencies.
One of the key aspects I wanted to address was to explain the hours spent on research projects, and also the set of tasks that are undertaken for each of them. To quantify the effort behind each project, I adopted a T-shirt sizing system (S, M, L, XL) to indicate project size. Such sizes can vary across organizations, so I created a guide tailored to our team’s context, shown below. This guide outlines the specific actions defining each size, making the system clearer and more relatable.
This repository has become indispensable for saving time, tracking hours, and showcasing the impact of research in a clear and structured way.