Implement atomic research using Enjoy HQ

In this guide, we’ll assume that you already know the fundamentals of atomic research and are looking for the perfect tool to implement this framework in your organization. If that’s not the case, we highly recommend you explore the links below before diving into this guide.

Foundations of atomic research by Tomer Sharon

The atomic unit of a research insight by Tomer Sharon

The three most popular questions about Atomic Research by Tomer Sharon

As a platform, EnjoyHQ was designed to support multiple research frameworks, including atomic research. One of the advantages of implementing atomic research in EnjoyHQ is that you have maximum flexibility to change your approach over time.

Let’s have a quick look at how EnjoyHQ supports atomic research concepts:

Nuggets = Stories

As Tomer Sharon defines it, “A Nugget is a tagged observation supported by evidence. It’s a single-experience insight about a customer’s experience. The insight is backed by evidence in the form of a short video snippet (15–45 seconds) of a customer talking about or demonstrating the experience. A nugget is assigned with a series of tags that classify it and help find it later on”

In EnjoyHQ, a Nugget is usually captured as a Story. You can think of Stories as mini blog posts that allow you to describe an insight or observation and embed multiple pieces of evidence into it.

The story format allows for flexibility when elaborating on your observations; You can always combine evidence coming from multiple sources of feedback via integrations, data coming from previous research projects and more. You can always trace your evidence right back to the source. Additionally, EnjoyHQ allows you to associate any piece of evidence with a specific participant's/customer’s profile very easily.

Evidence = Documents and highlights

We use the term "Documents" to describe evidence in EnjoyHQ. This could include video clips, images, audio files, support tickets, survey responses, call recordings, sales notes, NPS responses, app reviews, etc. All of these are documents in EnjoyHQ.

We also have “Highlights,” or highlighted pieces of text found in your documents. Highlights belong to documents and are the mechanism used to extract a juicy quote or important snippet.

Your evidence may be a series of Highlights created from interview transcripts, or it could be a combination of Documents such as video clips, survey responses, and customer quotes. It depends on your research project and the evidence you think would bring that insight or observation to life.

Customer or participant profiles

Customer and participant profiles work globally across the entire account so you can always track how many interactions you’ve had with a participant, even throughout multiple studies or channels. A customer profile is directly associated with the document or highlight. This means you don’t have to use labels or tags to capture participant information.

Using customer profiles in EnjoyHQ allows you to easily conduct searches across all of your studies. For example, you could say, “Show me all the evidence we have about a specific topic by a specific group of customers or personas.”

One of the superpowers of using EnjoyHQ is the ability to connect native integrations like Typeform, Salesforce, Intercom, AppStore, and Qualtrics to your account. This lets you search not only the data you gather through customer interviews or usability testing, but also valuable customer information collected by teams across your organization, like support, sales, and marketing.

Other integrations available in EnjoyHQ allow you to connect your research practice with the tools your team uses to deliver work. For instance, our Jira integration can create a bi-directional relationship between research projects and tickets/epics in Jira, allowing you to understand how much research is feeding product decisions and ultimately impacting your customers.

Tags vs labels

In EnjoyHQ, we use two distinct sets of tools to organize and classify data. Tags and Properties are used to classify raw data (Evidence), and we use Labels to classify Stories (Nuggets).

Evidence (Documents and highlights)

Evidence (Documents and highlights)    Nuggets (Stories)
Tags: Tags are mostly used for analysis. We recommend using tags for high-level classification, for example:
Examples: Feature request, UX Issue, Pre-Sales, Signup, Usability Problem, Onboarding, Bug, Upgrade, Integrations, Trial, Non-Upgrade, General Feedback, Retention, Cancellation, etc.

Properties: You can think of properties as “super tags”. You can use properties to add more context to your highlights. They are very flexible in that you can create one property and associate multiple values to it. This let’s you create patterns for classification. Examples:

• Property: Sales Objection
• Values:
• No budget
• No buy-in
• Customer missed value
• Internal barrier
• Needed more support
• The critical feature is missing
• Property: Product Area
• Values
• Uploads
• Exports
• API
• Check-out
• Billing

Nuggets (stories)

Labels: Labels are used to organize your Stories so they are easy for team members to filter and find by colleagues. You can use multiple labels for Stories, some teams combine labels that describe the type of insight, the product or product area it relates to. You can use as many labels as you need.

In the same way, you use labels to organize your projects, you want to use labels to organize your observations. It is ok if they overlap, the idea is to make it as easy as possible for the rest of the organization to find information. Examples:

• Observation type: Usability testing
• Severity: High, medium, low
• Type of experience: Online, offline
• Experience: Negative, positive, neutral

Having these two distinct ways of organizing raw data (Evidence) and Stories (Nuggets) helps you maintain a flexible taxonomy that stakeholders will find helpful while giving you the freedom to experiment with the Tags and Properties you use to analyze your raw data.

For example, if you connect Salesforce, Typeform, or Zendesk to your account, EnjoyHQ will import tags from those systems and merge them with the Tags you’ve created in your account; This allows you to create reports and visualizations not only from your research data but also from your customer feedback.

EnjoyHQ also has features like the tag, property, and label managers that allow you to keep your taxonomy in shape and evolve it over time. If you are interested in learning about taxonomies, we highly recommend checking out Taxopalooza.

How to use research projects to go from the research plan to nuggets

Let’s talk about Research projects in EnjoyHQ. A Research Project supports the whole research process, from creating a research plan to storing and analyzing raw data in different ways, and finally sharing your findings in the form of Stories (Nuggets). Projects are usually used for finite studies, like hypothesis validation, feature research, personas, usability testing sessions, etc.

But, what about continuous discovery?

You can also use research projects to continuously store evidence you are gathering that may not necessarily be related to your research questions. An example would be interesting themes that emerge from discovery calls with customers.

In your account, you can have a project called “Continuous Discovery” in which you collect evidence about different topics you encounter over time. You can then create Stories if you notice interesting themes emerging and only publish them when you feel you have gathered enough evidence.

In EnjoyHQ, only Stories that have been marked as “Published” can be accessed by all read-only users; Stories in draft mode are only visible to admins and collaborators. Remember, you have unlimited read-only users at no cost in your account.

Power-user features that help you save time and make your insights more impactful

Here are a couple of killer features to keep your Nuggets organized and your stakeholders in the loop. Each of these features was designed to reduce the time you spend maintaining your repository and maximize the impact of your research.

Final words

Special thanks to Tomer Sharon for paving the way and for his incredible contributions to the UX discipline and community. We also can’t thank our customers enough for continually teaching us how to make EnjoyHQ more impactful.