On creating a User Experience Knowledge Base
In my job I have had the opportunity to work on many different products, though most are in the same “product family” – the basic functionality and processes are similar, though sold for different customers/audiences. After executing many different designs and usability tests, I amassed a tremendous amount of information: findings, best practices, user expectations, etc.
I had been relying on my own (all-too-human) memory to keep track of and apply all this understanding for new design projects – obviously, that doesn’t “scale.” So, what to do with all this “stuff?”
After consulting with my colleagues I decided that a formal knowledge base was needed and, after looking at various content management systems I settled on a more direct and simple solution – Wordpress. Setting up the paid version of Wordpress on an OS X server that my team acquired, I was able to quickly configure a site that allowed any of our UX team to add content about the projects they were working on.
Wordpress was the perfect solution for this need. The built-in search fucntion allowed for quick access, meta tags could be added to postings to assist in grouping like content, and categories can be assigned to chuk like content (“UX test findings”, “Best Practices”, “Personas,” etc.). We could also upload attachments and even applied a plug-in that allowed for postings to exported as PDFs for sharing this content with individuals outside our team. Our UX Knowledge Base has become a part of our process, and an incredibly useful one.
If you are in a UX design team and have created a lot of content and legacy research findings, I strongly recommend trying out a similar solution. It has really helped my group, and it can assist yours as well.
