Workshop to map out research documentation needs

[jaclinec]

In CS UX sync the team discussed needing to improved research practice documentation. Currently, research is documented in several places and is not easily findable, discoverable, or navigable:

• Google drive (internal only, most up-to-date and robust source of information)
• USWDS Research page (public, not often updated)
• uswds GitHub wiki (public, needs overhaul to make it more useful and usable)
• Scattered through GitHub issues, viewable on the "UX and A11y findings" project view tab on the project board (for instance, problems found in usability testing are documented as issues)

The first step is for researchers to get with content strategy to map our where things are documented now, what people need from documentation (users and use cases), and ideate on possible solutions.

[jaclinec]

I re-discovered some work I already started on this from a while back. I started mapping research documentation platforms and general notes, pros, and cons about them in this Mural board

[jaclinec]

Next steps:

• Carolyn and I will first meet and identify/build the structure of the workshop
• Carolyn and I will have a working session/workshop to outline goals and vision, research content/documentation current state and possible future state.
• We'll list out next steps for getting started and capture them in GitHub so work can begin

[jaclinec]

Carolyn and I met yesterday and did some research repo planning using this Research Repo Planning FigJam board 🔒

We outlined general goals for improving on research documentation, current challenges, audience needs, current state of research documentation, possible solution (a centralized docs repo), and concrete next steps that we want to accomplish this quarter.

Next steps for docs repo MVP:

• Coordination with accessibility to align as we set it up
• Review examples of other repos that use the GitHub markdown file approach
• Review tutorials for how to work with GitHub markdown files and using tags and metadata
• Ideate on the folder structure and file naming conventions we might use
• Publish a study as a file to get familiar with the mechanics
• Explore how to use metadata/labels to improve automation and findability.
• Identify the mechanics of how updates might get automatically made to the site
• Further refine the structure and process of publishing research in markdown files as we learn more
• Make a decision and recommendation about whether or not we should move forward with using the docs repo and markdown files.

I created an epic (#469) with sub-issues to capture this work.

[jaclinec]

Ready for FFR @annepetersen