Creating Internal Documentation
Clear, detailed internal documentation can accelerate the onboarding process for new researchers, and serves as a go-to reference that researchers can rely on without overwhelming you with questions.
In this lesson of our Team Building & Coordination with Research Hub course, we’ll discuss:
- Types of internal documentation you should create for your team
- Existing resources and templates you can adapt for internal use
Often, creating internal documentation is the most time-consuming part of team training and onboarding, so this will be the most lengthy lesson of this course. To make this process as easy as possible for you, we’ve identified existing templates, articles, and other resources that you can adapt to train your team (including these Academy courses!).
📹 Prefer watching to reading? This content is available as both an article and a video. Watch our Customer Success Specialist, Kaylynn, take you through the content in the video below or keep reading to dive in!
Types of internal documentation to create for your team
Here are some of the most common types of internal resources you should consider creating for your team.
1. Research best practices
Establishing best practices is essential for any team, but especially those in which non-researchers (such as product managers or UX designers) are conducting research on their own.
Best practices documentation ensures that everyone—from novice researchers to experienced team members—follows ethical and methodologically sound procedures. You’ll want to cover information like:
- How to ask good research questions
- How to choose the right research method
- How to determine recruiting criteria
- How to analyze and present data
… and more, depending on the existing knowledge and skills on your team.
2. Consent forms, NDAs, and other legal must-haves
Compliance is crucial, so you need to make sure your team has access to the appropriate consent forms, NDAs, and other documentation to ensure participants' rights are respected, and the company is protected from legal risks.
This documentation should all be put in place before any research activity begins, especially in industries like healthcare or finance where data privacy is critical.
You should have already set up your consent form in our Hub for ReOps: Setup and Onboarding course. If you have our Document Signing add-on, you can automate participant signature collection for these forms to ensure that this critical step is never skipped by any researcher on your team.
Not sure what should be included in your consent form? Try this consent form template for inspiration.
3. Tool tutorials
The typical research toolkit can include any number of tools—from recruiting and panel management tools like User Interviews to tools for prototyping, unmoderated tests, surveys, quantitative analysis and more.
Create easy-to-follow tutorials for any tool you expect your team to regularly use in their research. This way, you ensure that both new and old team members can effectively use these tools without needing hands-on support each time.
For Research Hub tutorials, you can lean on the content in this UI Academy and the researcher Help Center. We’re constantly creating and updating the technical documentation and tutorials for our product, so much of this content can be easily adapted for training your team.
4. Recruitment workflow templates
Recruitment is one of the most time-consuming aspects of research, so any templates and documentation you can create here can significantly improve the efficiency of research across your team.
In Research Hub, many of the templates and settings you need to streamline the recruitment workflow are built right into the platform. For example, you can create templates for emails, projects, screener surveys, and confirmation pages. Other features like sender profiles and panel segments are also helpful in this area.
5. Method-specific guides
Different research methods all have their own use cases, nuances, and best practices. Method-specific guides help teams apply the right approach for the best-quality results.
In Research Hub, you can create project templates for all of the different methods your team might use, which can help enforce best practices in the research design process. Additionally, you can lean on the tips, templates, and information in our UX Research Field Guide and UX Research Launch Kits to help develop your team’s expertise in different research methods.
6. Moderation and note-taking guides
Effective moderation and note-taking are critical for collecting and remembering useful data during research sessions, so it’s helpful to offer moderator scripts, question banks, note-taking matrices, and other similar resources to your team.
Here are 17 note-taking templates and 70+ user testing questions that you can adapt for your team.
7. Templates for presenting findings
Finally, findings presentations and other research deliverables are crucial for ensuring that the insights your team gathers are actually understood and used to create value — so creating templates and guides for this aspect of research can set your team up for success as well.
For inspiration, check out these 31 presentation templates and examples.
Free resources and templates you can adapt for internal use
To help our customers succeed, UI’s customer success, support, and marketing teams are constantly working to create and improve our product resources. The following resources can be copy-and-pasted or adapted with info specific to your company to save time and energy during the team enablement process:
- UI Academy courses and lesson slides: UI-specific learning paths tailored for different types of researchers and experience levels. Assign courses to researchers on your team for onboarding, or download the slides to present the courses to your team yourself.
- Free Research Templates: UI offers a variety of free downloadable templates for different aspects of the research process, including recruiting, note-taking, diary studies, and more.
- UX Research Field Guide: A comprehensive how-to guide to the foundational aspects of user research—perfect for new or less experienced researchers who need a reference for basic research best practices.
- UI Help Center: Technical documentation and tutorials for all aspects of the User Interviews platform. Reference these articles for Hub-specific tips and information.
- UX Research Launch Kits: Our launch kits include templates, pre-filled recruiting projects, and basic FAQs for specific research methods. These kits are a great place to start when creating project templates or methods-specific guides for your team.
Tools and calculators like the Incentives Calculator, Qualitative Sample Size Calculator, and Methods Selection Tool: For personalized, data-backed recommendations on tricky decisions like what incentive to offer or how many participants to recruit, try one of our free calculators.