How Morningstar Uses a Research Repository to Scale Design Operations

How can you prioritize collecting user feedback when you have limited research resources?

Morningstar design director Jordan Sheckman leans on a research tech stack that expands his team’s capacity. 

Jordan runs Morningstar’s Individual Investor design team, which is an international group of 11 UX, content, and visual designers. They support the brand’s media website Morningstar.com, a subscription product called Morningstar Investor, and a series of print publications. 

Today, the team doesn’t have dedicated user researchers, so the designers run research studies and analyze feedback themselves. They use tools like Marvin to streamline and organize this process, so they can focus on talking to customers and designing great digital experiences. 

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Make research a priority

Jordan and his team have always recognized the importance of user research.

“We can empathize as individuals all we want, but we need to hear from both people actively using our products and prospects using competitors,” Jordan said. 

To get more time and resources for user research, they had to get others invested. To start, Jordan recommends running initial tests and user interviews on your own and sharing results with stakeholders. 

“You have to prove that speaking to customers generates important analysis that can inform future work,” he said. “I've seen people's eyes open. They didn’t know this information was out there for the taking.” 

Collaborate with other stakeholders

After identifying stakeholders who recognize the value of research, the Individual Investor design team got them involved. 

“Get other stakeholders to participate in research sessions, too. It doesn’t have to be just designers,” Jordan said.

Inviting other teams to participate generated more interest. Now, Jordan and his team frequently get requests to collaborate on research from product managers, marketers, and even engineers. “We have a lot of people interested in research and talking to our customers,” he said. 

The team recently ran a series of exit interviews with customers who took a trial of their product and decided not to renew. “It was a cross-functional effort with product, design, and marketing,” Jordan said. “The conversation alone that came out of it was so fruitful. It completely changed how we talk about new work.” 

The results of the study directly impacted the product roadmap and led the team to their next area of focus. 

Organize user feedback in a repository

Before they started using Marvin, the team stored notes, survey data, and recorded interviews on an internal website. Designers were responsible for adding all research to the site, then formatting and tagging it. The manual nature was a major pain point. 

“It led to inconsistencies that made it difficult to find and digest the content we were looking for,” Jordan said. “It felt very old world. We had to do cleanup a couple times a year to make sure the formatting and tags were right.”

Now, Jordan and his team store all their research in Marvin’s research repository. When designers or stakeholders want insight into a specific product or workflow, they can go to Marvin and search through every study the team has conducted. This streamlines the discovery process and often reduces the need to conduct additional research studies. 

“The transcript that we get from Marvin is much more accurate than what we usually get from Zoom, so we can use that transcript to search back into conversations and bookmark parts that are relevant,” Jordan said.

They collect two types of feedback:

• Rolling feedback.These responses are collected through a link on Morningstar’s website. The feedback is tracked using a third-party tool called Qualtrics, which integrates directly with Marvin. 
  
• Research initiatives. These are research studies for specific projects or campaigns. The designers plan the research, record sessions or send surveys, and store the recordings and results in Marvin. 

Streamline analysis of your user research 

After conducting research, the team aggregates the recorded interviews or survey data and uses Marvin’s AI tools to analyze them. This helps them easily identify patterns and overlap in perception. 

“We can get key takeaways pretty much immediately. Before, this used to take hours. Now it takes AI minutes,” Jordan said. 

Marvin’s analysis features can quickly generate thematic, emotional, and trend analyses across multiple files and projects. They can also create charts, graphs, and other data visualizations to communicate results. 

Jordan and his team review and validate the findings by checking the sources and annotations. 

“We always dig into the specific comments to make sure they’re aligned with the feedback that was generated,” he said.

When you’re on a tight timeline, these features make a big difference. 

“Overall, the research analysis goes much faster now,” Jordan said. “Before, a study may have taken a month from inception to analysis, but now it might just be a couple weeks.” 

Share user insights with everyone

When analysis is complete, Jordan and his team compile the research results into Insights, which are research reports created and stored in Marvin. They can incorporate quotes, notes, and even clips from the recorded interviews. Marvin also has tools to make writing reports even faster, like AI Writer, an integrated AI report writing assistant. 

“Now Marvin is the home for all of our insight reports too, so people know exactly where to find them. That’s a huge benefit,” Jordan said. 

The team sends out reports to stakeholders after each research project. They also generate reports on rolling feedback once a month to circulate to the team. 

Jordan recommends socializing your results as much as possible: 

“It helps make it feel like a conversation that the whole team is a part of. We’ve seen so much value in our recent research studies, so now there’s more of a desire to incorporate collecting user feedback in the discovery phase of major new initiatives.” 

Expand your research capabilities

Ready to start or scale your team’s user research practice? Start by proving the value of research with our free guide: 7 Real-World Strategies for Demonstrating Research Impact.

Or, explore more customer stories to learn how other companies are scaling their research initiatives with Marvin.