Key Takeaways
📊 Traditional reports often fail to clearly connect evidence to recommendations, limiting their effectiveness
🔎 Atomic UX Research breaks down knowledge into smaller, more manageable components for better clarity and usability
👥 The framework enhances collaboration by making research data accessible and reusable across projects
📈 Atomic UX Research supports continuous learning and scalability, allowing organizations to refine and expand insights over time
Boost your research impact with Atomic UX Research. This framework turns data into clear, actionable insights, making it easier to share and use.
Limitations of traditional research reports
Research is worthless if we can’t get it to those who need the knowledge to make decisions. Usually, we do this with reports, but they present some limitations. If fact, according to our data from a survey of UX professionals:
The biggest challenges are:
- Clarity: It can be hard for readers of a report to understand how the evidence supports the recommendations
- Scope: Traditional reports are usually written concerning just the findings of that particular research exercise, but fail to include evidence from the wider organization.
- Shareability: It is hard for other teams to discover knowledge when they are locked up in reports, which leads to a lot of time searching through irrelevant information, missing out on important knowledge, and research being lost or repeated.
Below, we’ll introduce you to an effective solution to all the tree problems and explain how it can change the way you report research.
What is the solution?
Atomic UX Research is a framework that was created by Daniel Pidcock, designed to optimize the research process and make it easy to scale. But what exactly is Atomic UX Research, and how can your organization benefit from it? Let’s dive in.
What is Atomic UX Research?
Atomic UX Research is a framework that breaks down the knowledge into four distinct parts, known as “atoms”: Experiments, Facts, Insights and Recommendations. The combination of these atoms creates a molecule of knowledge.
Each atom can be categorized and connected with many others, helping people to make good decisions, always based on evidence. This method is an inspiration from Brad Frost’s Atomic Design, a concept widely used to build design systems.
Key components of Atomic UX Research
Experiments
Think give context for how we learned something. It could be any kind of research, or source but allows people to understand where the information came from.
Facts
Facts are what we learned through our Experiment. A good fact can be a quote, an observation or statistic, but it is never our opinion.
Insights
Insights are our opinion of why the Facts are what they are. They can be the cause or the effect of the evidence. “This is the reason I think our participants are saying this – this is the effect it has on our organization and our customers.”
Recommendations
Recommendations are what we think we should do with this knowledge. The actionable result of what has come before. Most Recommendations are testable which creates new Experiments and the cycle continues.
Implementing Atomic UX Research in your process
1. Collecting Data
Start by organizing research data (which we call ‘Facts’) into an experiment. Facts will always belong to an experiment because the way they were learned is intrinsic to that experiment. Good facts can include user quotes, survey responses, usability test results, and observational notes. The key is to capture the Facts without adding any bias to it.
To collect those, you need to conduct thorough user research. An all-in-one research tool like UXtweak will be of great help here. Organize user interviews, set up usability tests and run surveys – all within one user-friendly platform.
2. Creating Insights
Combine related Facts to create powerful Insights. These might be insights that we already had or new ideas. We can connect to new facts that either support this idea or are evidence against it.
Because insights don’t belong to a single experiment means we can bring evidence together from across the entire organization to prove or disprove an insight. Overtime we will find these living
Insights shouldn’t be just a summary of the data. For example, if multiple users mention a similar issue with navigation, group these quotes together to form a single insight, that can be the cause or the effect of it. But remember this is not a rule: a singular Fact can be linked to more than one Insight if needed, or a group of Facts can be connected to only one insight. It will always depend on what the evidence is showing you.
Here’s how Daniel Pidcock summarizes the importance of defining insights in UXR Geeks podcast episode w/Larissa Schwedersky: Tiny pieces, big picture: the world of atomic research
It’s easy when a customer says this or a customer does that, to immediately jump to solutions, but what’s really important is asking, why is that happening? What’s the insight? It forces you to think deeper, which often leads to more innovative and effective solutions.
3. Building Recommendations
Use your Insights to generate Recommendations based on your evidence. They must be short enough to be consumed in a few seconds and contain enough context to be understood in isolation. Remember to continuously test them to make sure your decisions are going the right way.
4. Sharing your knowledge
Atomic is primarily a synthesis process, you will likely get richer results from your research, but additionally, these assets are shareable and can massively reduce the amount of reporting you need to do.
Recommendations are great for decision makers so they can understand what we propose, the thinking behind the idea, and the evidence for and against those ideas. We can give them a holistic and balanced view to allow them to make high quality decisions.
Of course we can still use reports if our stakeholders require. These are great for giving more context not covered by the research and allowing you to curate information. Importantly you knowledge is already stored from undertaking the atomic flow so it should not add any more time to your work flow and ideally will reduce it.
Some quick tips:
Categorizing and organizing
Once you have your atoms, categorize them based on themes or topics. This could be done using a tagging system or a dedicated research repository tool. The goal is to create a structured and searchable database with a good taxonomy. We recommend Glean.ly as a powerful tool for this purpose! It’s a research repository that was built around the Atomic UX Research framework.
Work backwards
We don’t need to always work left to right – Fact to Recommendation. If someone has an idea we can add it as a recommendation and mark it as an hypothesis. Then we can work backwards to see what evidence we have to support or disprove, and create Experiments to fill the knowledge gaps.
This framework isn’t rigid. It allows you to adapt depending on what you need—whether you start with facts and move to insights, or start with a hypothesis and work backwards. It’s about flexibility.
Benefits of using the Atomic UX Research framework:
Improved organization
By breaking down the knowledge into smaller components, researchers and non-researchers can maintain a clear and organized repository of information. This makes it easier to locate specific evidence and reduces the possibilities of losing valuable data in a sea of notes and documents.
Enhanced collaboration
Atomic UX Research facilitates better collaboration among team members. Since all the data is organized into easily understandable components, it becomes easier for different team members with different backgrounds to access and contribute to the research process. This structured approach ensures that everyone is on the same page and can work together more effectively.
Reusability
One of the highlights of this framework is the reusability of research evidence. Insights and recommendations can be reused across different projects and contexts. This not only saves time but also ensures consistency.
Scalability
Atomic UX Research can scale effortlessly. The framework allows you to add new data without overwhelming it. This scalability keeps your research process efficient and effective, no matter the project’s size.
Richer results
By organizing the data into small and structured components, people can easily identify patterns. This synthesis of information leads to deeper and more meaningful insights, ultimately enhancing the overall quality of your research.
Atomic UX research creates a beautiful network of interconnected and quite holistic views of what we know and what we don’t know. It’s not just about the data we have, but about how we connect that data to build a more complete picture.
Conclusion
Atomic UX Research offers a systematic and scalable approach to organize and scale your research data. It can be easily used by researchers and non-researchers, empowering research democratization into the whole company.
As Larissa beautifully puts it:
Atomic UX research means research democratization, which is something that we consider very important. The process allows anyone to contribute to creating facts, generating insights, and even making recommendations.
By breaking down information into its smallest components, it’s easier to maintain clarity, enhance collaboration, and ensure reusability of evidence across different projects. As user needs continue to evolve, adopting frameworks like Atomic UX Research can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your research process, leading to better user experiences.
Implementing this framework might require an initial investment of time and effort, but apart from this learning curve you’ll find long-term benefits in terms of organization, collaboration, and scalability that makes it worthwhile. Embrace Atomic UX Research and take your research process to the next level.
Marielle de Geest and Daniel Pidcock created this Atomic UX Research cheatsheet to help people to create good and useful Facts, Insights, and Recommendations, which you can download. This will give you some tips and best practices, as well as give clarification on the definitions of each.
And to support all your research activities while you’re at it, UXtweak is your go-to tool. An all-in-one UX Research platform for user research, interviews, usability testing and so much more! Register for your UXtweak account and try it yourself.
