Company-Wide Research Library

Role: Content Design, Information Architecture, Webmaster

Impact: 4,000 subscribers, and many thank-you emails

When I started at Indeed.com in 2016, I was only the third UX researcher to be hired. At that time, my boss casually mentioned that we would need a research repository.

To attack this problem, I leveraged my publishing expertise from my previous role in digital news company. After identifying the available options, an internal WordPress site turned out to be the most user-friendly platform for researchers to post their work, and the one requiring the least maintenance from internal developers. Using WordPress’s plugins, we started a curated newsletter that eventually grew to 4000 subscribers in a 10k company. We also added custom form fields to facilitate data entry for what grew to be a team of 30 researchers, as well as including data science and marketing research in the library.

Research repositories don’t get much love in conversations about user research, but they’re a critical part of what I like to call “knowledge infrastructure.” To put it another way, you can run as many studies as you like, but if there’s no consistent way to get the information to company at large, one will ultimately fail in one’s quest to have people make data-drive and user-centered decisions.

I also leveraged my knowledge of media newsletters to ensure that we had a useful (and not annoying!) newsletter for sharing new research every week. By the time I left Indeed, we had 4,000 subscribers. More importantly, the research library was well-known and praised amongst many departments, leading to emails thanking both myself and the researchers who posted in the library. For this reason, it remains one of my favorite, and most impactful, projects to date.