Thoughts on UX Research Documentation

What kind of research doc­u­men­ta­tion is most use­ful for agile teams? What I have seen to work best has been light­weight doc­u­men­ta­tion. This would be using a wiki to record issues, focus­ing on debriefs, cir­cu­lat­ing tran­scripts, and get­ting every­one to observe tests. How­ever, I find that there is a great deal of pres­sure in the UX Com­mu­nity to track all of our find­ings in a database.

Here is what I think:

• With lim­ited resources, it’s not prac­ti­cal. I think track­ing usabil­ity issues in a data­base is a great idea in the­ory, but in prac­tice I haven’t seen it work out so well. We man­aged a “usabil­ity find­ings data­base” in a pre­vi­ous job, but it was unfor­tu­nately never used… Researchers spent a great deal of time main­tain­ing the data­base, but design­ers never ref­er­enced it. Researchers would even walk through the data­base with design­ers, but design­ers would always say watch­ing a fresh new study was so much more insightful.
• It doesn’t align with lean/ux prin­ci­ples. Agile devel­op­ment val­ues work­ing soft­ware over doc­u­men­ta­tion. I think this means it is more valu­able to *see* some­one using your design. It’s becom­ing eas­ier and eas­ier to test work­ing soft­ware, pro­to­types, etc. (using unmod­er­ated test­ing, live-intercept recruit­ment meth­ods, etc.) Instead of doc­u­men­ta­tion, we should be focused on debriefs, dis­cus­sions, and get­ting every­one exposed to users…
• Old usabil­ity issues get out dated — fast. I don’t think we should base today’s design deci­sions on data we col­lected a year ago — the web is chang­ing so fast, as well as our prod­ucts.  We should be putting our focus on ‘expo­sure hours’ get­ting design­ers exposed to users more, which has a direct, proven impact on mak­ing prod­ucts bet­ter and bet­ter. Some of the issues I found even a month ago, in an iPhone study, are no longer valid, since we’ve made updates to the products…

Here’s the real truth: the only doc­u­men­ta­tion that is nec­es­sary is in the form of *user sto­ries* on prod­uct back­logs. Period.

What has been your expe­ri­ence track­ing usabil­ity issues? Check back at a later date for fur­ther thoughts on UX Documentation.