What exactly, you ask, is a design team’s “research repository”? In fact, what is “a design team”? These digital concepts are fairly new but can easily be understood. A design team is a group of individuals whose overall task is to work through accumulated data to acquire material that will serve a specific purpose, usually a marketing campaign for a business or a product. The materials they are seeking are types of pertinent information, research findings and statistics. As you might imagine, they use data mining tools to obtain a great deal of information. The data they acquire and work with is called the research repository. To gain a fuller understanding of the function of the design team and the research repository they create, it is a good idea to take a more detailed look.
Every Person on the Design Team Has a Different Function
The design team is made of individuals whose interests are quite distinct but complement one another. Thus, it takes a real group effort to satisfy the priority of all those involved. The design team embodies multiple intentions for the collected data, insights and recommendations produced. Among the interests represented on the team are:
- Investors, the financial stakeholders interested in the ultimate profitability of the research
- Researchers, the people who set the parameters of the research and express its goals
- Designers, the creatives who find relevance in the data and meld it into a useful form
- Managers, the leaders who work to bring the team together
Research Repositories Can Vary Widely
The designers who bring in pertinent information want to have the best possible repository to handle the data they are collecting. The state-of-the-art platform today is a user research repository, one that is engineered for speed, accessibility and full analysis. This platform is superior to those used by some design teams who attempt to adapt apps and software meant for other purposes and used them as a research repository. Too often this produces deceptive data or unusable results. Design teams fair much better when given the proper tools. When describing the repository, you will often encounter the acronym “UX,” which is shorthand for “user experience.” This is a reference to the experience customers have when using the product the design team is researching.
A Design Team Can Create Superb Results With Properly Gathered Data
When the design team does have access to the tools and information it needs, there comes a point when the strategizing, gathering of data, analyzing and refining yields the desired outcome and the ultimate design begins to take shape. In describing this point, the Harvard Business Review suggests that everyone on the team should contribute to the final vision because the design team “is capable of incredible things, and it’s only by working together that we can truly unlock its potential.”
Gathering data into a research repository is a key step for the design team. If the repository is well-engineered, refining the information for the team’s purposes is a simple, very productive process.
