UX Glossary | R
Research repository
Also: Research library, Insights repository, Research knowledge base
A shared, searchable collection of research material that keeps findings reusable across teams and over time.
A research repository is where a team keeps what it has learned: interview recordings and transcripts, notes, survey results, reports, and the insights drawn from them. The point is not storage. It is that someone starting a project next year can find out what you already know before commissioning the same study again.
What it is for
Most research is used once, by the people in the room, and then forgotten. Staff move on, folders get renamed and the same questions get asked again at full price. A repository makes findings durable. It lets a new designer see what is known about onboarding, lets a product manager check a claim against actual evidence, and lets a later study build on an earlier one.
Repository versus report
A report tells one story about one study. A repository holds the pieces underneath it, tagged so they can be recombined. The useful unit is often smaller than a report: a single observation, a quote with a context note and a link to the recording. Good research synthesis can then draw on evidence from several studies at once.
What goes wrong
Repositories fail through neglect, not tooling. A shared drive with a hundred unlabelled files is a graveyard, however searchable. What helps is a small, consistent set of tags, a standard way of summarising each study at the top, and one named person who owns the habit of adding to it.
Treat people’s data with care. Recordings are personal data, so decide who can see them, how long you keep them, and what participants agreed to.