There’s a standard, accepted procedure for how you do user research. It typically goes something like this:

Find users to talk to. Schedule user tests and interviews. Synthesize findings into a research report. Build new feature. Rinse and repeat.

The sheer amount of information that you collect when you talk to your users makes it tempting to implement something simple and repeatable. But these established methodologies can actually make it harder to get at the point of user research: identifying how to build better software for your users.

That’s because the way you run your research is highly dependent on the questions you’re asking and the product you’re building.

You want to construct a process that has the flexibility to evolve over time while storing the original context of your data collection. That’s why we’ve put together some of our favorite UX templates that our community has created in Airtable. We hope that they’ll work as building blocks for your own systems.

1. WeWork’s Polaris: a UX research database for everyone