Research repository tools
If you are building a research repository, it is good to have a tool that makes your work easier.
My first recommendation is to start with a tool that is free or that is already working, it may not be as powerful as Dovetail but in my opinion it is better to start with something that is easy and quick to implement and iterate.
Here is a comparison of some tools that I tried and that can also help you create a better research repository.
But first, some considerations about this comparison
- It is necessary to have AI in your repo? Nope, but it is a good argument to sell the tool to your bosses and other stakeholders.
- Do you need a tag management system? Yup, it will make your life much much easier
- Atomic research? If you don’t know what atomic research is i recommend this introduction
- GDPR compliant. This is necessary if you work with data of european users
| IA | Gestión de tags | Atomic research | Cumple con GDPR | Precio | |
| Airtable | No | Kinda | Kinda | Yeap | Free [1] |
| Condens | Yeap | Yeap | Yeap | Yeap | Med |
| Confluence | No | Kinda | Med | Yeap | Med |
| Dovetail | Yeap | Yeap [2] | Yeap | Yeap | Expensive |
| Gleanly | No | Yeap | Yeap | No | Cheap |
| Miro | No | No | Yeap | Yeap? | Med |
Airtable
Airtable is a prettier and easier to use version of Exce.
The use of Airtable as a research repository is literally as an organizer of links, obviously links to your research. In one column you put the link to your research, in another column who did it, in another the date, description, in another a couple of tags (such as country, source type, device, status, etc.).
[1] The first 50K records are free, but this figure is more than enough to make a research repository
Example of research repository with Airtable
Condens
Condens is a more affordable alternative to Dovetail, it has the added value of being registered in Germany so customer service has flexible hours if you live in Europe, and they also have a GPDR agreement.
Example of research repository with condens
Confluence
Confluence is a tool for creating internal wikis in a more sophisticated way, and is part of the Atlassian suite, so if your team works with Jira or Bitbucket, you probably will have Confluence and have very powerful integrations with these tools.
Example of research repository with Confluence
What i did
- Created 3 folders:
- One with sources (User tests, analytics reports, marketing reports, etc.)
- Other with facts
- And another with insights
- Then I put links and tags that correlated the information on each page.
- The very powerful part is that all the people in the different teams already had an account and it was very easy to tag people.
Example
- A page where I put the results of a test in Maze that was in the sources folder
- Then I made a different page for each fact that I could extract from said test, at the end of said page I put a link to the pages with the sources
- And at the end one or two pages with the insights with links to the facts
Dovetail
Dovetail is the current standard for research repositories on the market. It is an expensive tool but with a very user-friendly design.
Dovetail works by creating projects, in these projects you create notes (These notes are your sources). Then you create highlights by selecting text from these notes which you can then categorize using tags and finally you create insights with these highlights.
As this is the tool we are currently using where I work I can tell you a little about the pros and cons in a little more detail.
Pros Dovetail
- You can view your projects in many ways, for example you can see your notes as cards, but also as tables, or by columns, etc.
- You can manage tags in a very powerful way
- You can create templates for projects
- You can import PDFs, CSVs, Videos, Images, Tables, etc.
- You have an expert who will give you support
Cons de Dovetail
- It’s very expensive, and I’ve heard some pretty scary stories about how every two years they raise the price a lot, so we recommend you back up your research elsewhere.
- This organization depends on certain parameters that are not modifiable, such as: Description, it generates them automatically and I haven’t found how to change it
- Tags only affect the project you’re currently on, so every new project you create you need to create said tags… which is a bit of a double-edged sword [2]
- CSV management is terrible (It’s a complicated system that generates a lot of notes and then they are difficult to manage) It’s much better to process CSVs in excel and put the conclusions in Dovetail
- There is no specific tool to make reports, so you have to make your reports using the insights
- The highlighting tool has a bug and fails when you select a text from a PDF
Example of research repository with Dovetail
Gleanly
It is a tool specifically created to make a research repository and was created by the person who popularized the term “Atomic research”
It guides you step by step to create the experiments, extract facts and then create insights. The disadvantage is that you cannot easily import video, pdfs and tables. In addition, it does not comply with the data protection law.
Example of research repository with Gleanly
Miro
Miro is a collaborative board for posting post-its, diagrams, etc.
To create a research repository in Miro, I recommend you watch the video by Eden Lazaness where she explains it in more detail… but basically the idea is to put verbatims and data grouped by different projects, on different post-its to have a global view of what data is available. Personally, I find it a bit complicated to navigate and search for information, but hey, maybe this solution works for your team.
Example of research repository with Miro
(The good stuff starts at 2:45)
Other tools
- EnjoyHQ: It is a tool created for the management of research repositories. The problem is that it does not comply with the GDPR law (At least when we where asking for a quote).
- Greatquestion: A tool to manage all your research, it is very focused on recruiting people for tests and managing testers…but for research repositories it is not very powerful.
- Userbit: It is a tool similar to EnjoyHQ but it is less powerful, for example it does not let you process PDF files…a big disadvantage since most of the reports and sources are usually in PDF.
Tags: english, UX, ux research