Even when organizations conduct and prioritize user research, the insights and learnings are not always used to their full potential. The findings are not shared with a wide enough audience, stored in an accessible place, or presented in a meaningful manner—so other teams aren’t aware that the resources even exist. This UXReactor play shows you how to centralize your resources, develop meaningful analysis, and use the data to find patterns and make predictions.

Who Are the Key players in the Insights Curation play?

ROLE	WHO’S INVOLVED	RESPONSIBILITIES
DRIVER	User researcher	Inventory resources and artifacts; Establish indexing process; Index resources; Maintain repository.
CONTRIBUTOR	Experience practitioners, cross‐functional teams	Provide supporting artifacts; Reference curated resources.

THE HOW

To effectively establish insights curation, you need to be mindful of:

1. The SOURCES and Storage of Your Insights

User insights live in all departments of an organization, not just in user research. Departments such as marketing, support, sales, and even finance all generate and collect valuable user and business data; however, this data often remains siloed in those departments.

Key user insights are the actions, soundbites, and observations gathered about the user in the department. These insights can include things that the user likes, dislikes, needs, feels, wants, and does in the context of the ecosystem or the product.

Break the silos and create a collective repository of all of your organization’s insights by:

• Taking inventory of all the teams that are collecting data on the users and business;
• Creating a single place for teams to store their data and insights.

The insights repository will need a designated digital storage space that is easily accessible for all parties in your organization but also secure enough for proprietary information. This allows for more transparency and collaboration across departments and ensures that data is not lost over time.

When building a robust repository, collect data of all shapes and sizes:

1. Static data, such as reports or analytics from instrumentation;
2. Dynamic data, such as social media chatter;
3. Quantitative data, such as satisfaction scores;
4. Qualitative data, such as videos or images from interviews.

2. What Systems You Put in Place for STRUCTURING Your Data

An insights repository is only helpful if its users can find the information they need. Once all of the data from across your organization is in a single place, structure the data to make it meaningful and easy to use.

Think about who will be leveraging the repository and what they will be leveraging it for.

Use this information to:

• Establish structured naming conventions;
• Create an intuitive information architecture;
• Define meaningful indexing.

A new employee might leverage the repository to learn everything there is to know about a specific product. An experience practitioner might leverage the repository to find all of the pain points for a specific user.

3. The Maturity of Your ANALYSIS

With your data structured, you can now begin getting value out of your insights repository. At the very minimum, an insights repository should help the user find what they were looking for. Further enhancements to the insights repository could include helping the user discover additional related resources or even predicting what information they will need.

There are two levels of analysis your organization should be conducting as your repository grows. They represent different levels of value you can generate with your repository.

4. Frequent SOCIALIZATION to Drive Utilization

When leveraged well, an insights repository can grow the tribal knowledge of your organization, increase overall empathy, and mitigate product churn. Everyone in the organization needs to be aware of and regularly leverage the repository.

• Give everyone access;
• Share insights often;
• Encourage frequent usage.

5. Consistent MAINTENANCE

Just as a library needs a librarian to manage the curation of books, an insights repository needs an owner to manage and maintain it.

Assign an owner to maintain the data to ensure it can be easily accessed and findable. This owner will use standardized processes and guidelines to make the repository user‐friendly, establish the cleanliness of metadata, and prevent churn for future owner(s) as the repository grows. They are responsible for keeping the repository up to date and relevant so that it will always drive value to your organization.