Increasing Your Team’s Efficiency by Using Research Standards and Templates

When in Doubt, Create a Template

Once you’ve standardized the fields that you need to fill in for every research document and created a global-tag taxonomy that your team is using, you’re rounding the corner in your ResearchOps journey and may be starting to get a little tired. So now it’s time to implement templates.

Let’s begin with the dreaded email template. Although this might not feel like a true research task, you’re right to think about the amount of time you spend writing email messages to interviewees and usability-test participants. This is time you could be using elsewhere!

Begin by writing out a simple, friendly email message for each of the various points in the email journey—from invitation, to meeting request, to your final thank-you message. Place all the copy in a single, easily accessible document and allow it to evolve over time. Personally, I’ve even found it helpful to have different versions of these email messages based on their tone or the customer segment. Do whatever works for your industry or organization.

As you continue building up your set of research templates, you’ll realize how many times you’ve created the same kinds of document more than once. The next time you receive a research request from another department, think through the questions you need to ask them, and put them into a template. Intake forms such as research requests are easy to create, but you must ensure that you get all of the information you need up front.

Templates ensure not only that you get the details that you need, but also keep your proposals on track for stakeholder presentations. Perhaps more than any other group, executive teams have very little time to spare, so the more consistently you cater to their needs by providing only the most critical highlights and data, the better the response you can expect.

Structure your report template as a simple outline. Each slide in my presentation template has a title, subheadings, and a short description of what each subsection includes. This can be as simple as outlining the following sections for each slide:

• Introduction
• Problem Statement
• Research Premise & Prediction
• Method
• Results
• Key Finding
• Final Takeaway
• Action Items

Let standardization not only guide what content makes the cut but also keep your research storyline from taking any detours that would pull your audience into unnecessary tangents that would take them away from your main point.

Keep Your Repository Current and Remove Irrelevant Research

Perhaps the most overlooked step in creating a clean slate for your current and future research operations is the simple task of archiving outdated or irrelevant research.

Imagine that you’d implemented all the organizational techniques I described earlier only to find that some research pertained to products that no longer exist or user segments that your company no longer serves. Keeping everything in your repository up to date helps you avoid any unexpected cleanups or having to wade through data that simply doesn’t need to be there.

To avoid such issues, it’s never too late to do a thorough audit of your existing research. If you have time for only a quick scan, look for the following items:

• research for legacy applications that have already sunsetted
• data for features that never came to fruition
• outdated or unnecessary survey data or secondary information

When I first joined my team, there were also a lot of research notes with only a sentence or two, when the intent was clearly to flesh out a larger idea. Ultimately, my clean-up effort, which began with archiving old data, ended with my discovering new opportunities to conduct deeper research into topics that had long been forgotten.

A Final Word

As you wrap up your endeavor to standardize some of your ResearchOps, you’ll hopefully find a few more minutes in your busy days to think about why your research matters and what users it would benefit. With a little bit of diligence and some thorough analysis, both templates and research requirements can benefit your UX practice.