Evidence boards: My must have resource as a UX Researcher

Exploring how centralising your key research learns into one board benefits the business and team as much as a repository

This is an approach I have only started to do recently, but which I have instantly seen benefits for doing. It has proved to be invaluable as a way of embedding research into the team. This takes inspiration from a detectives evidence board, which helps them piece together information and clues they have attained so that they can focus on their end goal. I strongly believe researchers should be creating something similar as the benefits shown in the article detail why.

Benefits

1) Centralised Information

Similar to a repository, an evidence board is a central location for your stakeholders to know as the focal point for all things research related to their project. This helps with organisation and communication as it becomes the go to point for their research needs. While repositories are still a central location, the information here is not scattered across multiple folders or documents.

2) You can see how the research is evolving

When starting out, the board will appear bare and a little unloved. However over time it will develop and become more and more powerful, as you see all the learns that have been gathered. When conducting research you will often have unanswered questions from 1 study that lead onto further research into another. The evidence board allows you to connect them all together, logging how one bit of research stems from another. This is great for the storytelling with stakeholders who might be less familiar with your work as they can see the origin which provides more credibility to your work.

3) Efficient

Arguably, this is also a more efficient approach than a research repository. Depending on the style of repository you have (and whether its tagged with the topics or themes), this way means your stakeholders are able to find the information in a more efficient way. Unlike a repository, an evidence board is visually grouped by themes.

If, for example, a stakeholder wanted the research on the user buying habits of a TV, they…