Atomic Research: What It Is And Why You Should Be Doing It

Atomic research, or atomic UX research, is defined as breaking down information and insights into “nuggets” (i.e. “atoms”), where each “nugget” consists of pertinent research information. While there are many ways to examine this concept, atomic research is, in simple terms, described as a methodology to manage research knowledge.

This model helps organize your user research and what you know about users into small, bite-sized information units and tagged information that consists of evidence.

Atomic research is becoming an essential element of insights and research repositories. It helps break down research silos, mitigates the effects of tribal knowledge, creates structure, and offers a business taxonomy to manage user research.

What are the benefits of atomic research?

Atomic research uses nuggets and provides researchers and stakeholders the ability to:

• Correctly record and categorize research and findings
• Quickly and flexibly access research and insights 
• Discover patterns, aid with macro factors like cost rollups, and reduce the time of existing and future studies
• Draw parallels between research techniques and methodologies
• Abolish siloed and tribal research information to make timely and accurate decisions

What are the nuggets that make up atomic research?

Nuggets in atomic research are simply described as tagged and searchable research data that is backed by evidence such as quotes, videos, snapshots, and any other supporting research information. These nuggets follow a predefined workflow and business taxonomy for setup and management.

Nuggets primarily consist of three major components that make the management of atomic UX research in your UX research repository simple. These components are:

• Observations: Putting together observations are a crucial component of user research. These observations capture knowledge from the research study that lives a concise life as with qualitative research. Without observations, insights tend to lose important, credible knowledge over time.

• Evidence: The simplest element of using nuggets in the atomic research process is the evidence. This component consists of supporting material in video, images, text, audio, and more.
• Tags: Lastly, tags form the core component of the nuggets as they make the research and insights indexable and searchable. This step consists of many parts, including information about methodology, research techniques, procedural information, and demographic information. To make the most of tags, however, it is critical also to capture experience (emotions, frequency, magnitude), business (revenue, business units, product), and service-oriented (purchase behavior and journey, physical setting) information to make the information as holistic as possible.

It is important to note that nuggets hold value to multiple stakeholders. However, nuggets with tagging enable the researcher and users of the research repository platform to make sense of insights and draw conclusions from various studies and nuggets.

Think of this as a critical piece of digitized and stored information that can be called upon easily to make the discovery of user research seamless and straightforward.

How can market researchers use atomic research?

Organizations can simply use a research repository to store atomic research to monitor trends and information about customers and users easily. Contrary to popular belief, though, research repositories need not just contain atomic knowledge. The most efficient research repository software consists of research in the atomic design, as well as other pertinent research such as reports.

It is important to note that if there are multiple studies and sources of information, the better the quality of insights for the present and the future. Knowledge discovery is more nuanced and structured when research is no longer a linear process like it used to be.

One thing is for certain: atomic research forces research to be a more evidence-based thinking process. Research can no longer be arbitrary or stagnant. With atomic UX research, your research repository is transformed into a knowledge-building tool that helps identify knowledge gaps.

The above process aids in not just identifying trendlines and faster uncovering of insights, but it also helps prioritize workloads and resources to more pressing matters.