You're in a product team, you're churning out serious volumes of prototypes and research, links are being sent to a number of different team members and Google docs are getting lost. Questions like "where is …?", "do you remember that document?", "which version?" keep getting asked. Does this sound familiar? Here's how I created a single source of research and design authority.

The need to track and surface user research

User research, no matter how little or large, should always be visible, clear and easily digestible to anyone who reads it. It is extremely easy to lose sight of what a user needs, rather than what they want, as the project develops. Having user research insights anchored in a centralised location that every member of the team can access will only aid user-centred design, as opposed to opinion or bias-based design.

How do you create a single source of truth?

So where do you start? Google Docs and spreadsheets can be used to a certain extent, but what I've observed is how often certain artefacts get lost or forgotten about after being shared once or twice. The level of engagement static documents receive drops sharply after the first viewing.

The way I sought to tackle this, based around the type of government project I was on, was to use the GOV.UK Prototyping Kit, though the same interface and methodology can be implemented in more mainstream prototyping tools like Figma, Sketch, or AdobeXD.

The primary users of the tracker were: user researchers (to view, document and track UR status and insights), UX and content designers (to provide an overview of the latest designs and design justifications), and stakeholders (to have a clear, high-level view of progress).

Version 1

After discussions with the immediate and wider team, the initial design included a hero section of signed-off and awaiting sign-off items, quick links to universally used artefacts, an accordion component containing every screen in the user journey, and a detailed view per screen including UR status, sign-off status, usability rating, design justifications, and research insights covering what was working, what wasn't, and recommended next steps.

Version 2

After publishing version 1 and gathering feedback, a general consensus emerged that having everything in one single location was genuinely useful across every level of the team. Stakeholders had an overview of sign-off status, user researchers could track findings in one place, and designers could refer to it as the latest version of their work.

Version 2 added a traffic light system highlighting screens that were a blocker, collapsed detail components explaining sign-off dependencies, and a tabbed accordion view splitting high-level pages, granular sub-pages, and quick links.

Version 3

As the tracker became the single point of reference for the whole team, scale became the problem. Accordions quickly become obsolete when the volume of screens and research insights grows. Version 3 replaced the accordion view with a filtered table and drop-down filters, making it future-proof regardless of how many screens or research insights were added.

Impact

• Research insights and latest designs were all in a single place of authority.
• The entire product team and stakeholders became much more engaged with the progress of each design and the justifications behind them.
• Developers, designers and researchers across two product teams used the tracker as a single reference point of discussion and critique.
• Designers and researchers had a clear view of screens with usability issues and understood why.