Plan to share
Before your research commences, you’ll need to reach an agreement with the business owner or external vendor on who owns the artefacts arising from the research, and how artefacts can be shared.
UX research reports have value beyond the end of your project because they contain findings and insights about how people think, and what their expectations are when interacting with government. Although the activity may be specific to your project, the insights arising from your research are often applicable to all manner of services across government.
In addition to your final report, the supporting materials like your test plans and recruitment specifications help government to understand and recreate the activity. Sharing the lessons learnt with specialists across government assists others to leverage existing knowledge to reduce duplication and waste.
For third-party vendor research
Using your organisation’s standard purchasing agreement terms should already give you the terms for managing intellectual property needed to share within Victorian government, while respecting the vendor’s trademarks, copyright or vendor-proprietary information.
Plan to include a deliverable of the research findings in your budget so that the work you do is preserved in a reusable way. Make sure when you accept a final research report that no materials intended to be shared are inappropriately copyrighted and that any statements in breach of the standard purchasing agreement are removed from the report before you sign off and accept the final document.
For internal research
You won’t need a contractual agreement to publish internal research in the same way you may do with a vendor, but you will need to reach an agreement before research commences.
It’s important to do this before you start so that you can keep in mind any limitations imposed by commercial sensitivities when writing up your findings, and avoid rework and disappointment later.
You’ll need to reach an agreement on what your report should contain and should not contain, what and how you can share with the community of practice, and with whom and when.
Check all artefacts are compliant with your information management policy for managing personal and commercially sensitive information. You should always de-personalise artefacts so that no personal details of participants are included in the report and supporting materials.
Share your research
If it’s not commercially sensitive, share with your community of practice and interested parties about your research. We can all learn from what you found out. A great way to do this is to share your report in the Community of Practice channel on Microsoft Teams(opens in a new window) (VPS access only). Sharing enables the wider digital community to benefit from your findings, reduces repetition and duplication of the same research.
Reading shared examples is also a great way to find a reporting style that suits your research activity.
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