Atomic Research: definition, methods, examples, tips, software

The number of market research studies conducted worldwide is increasing daily. Companies use these findings to draw conclusions about profitability, price sensitivity, market share, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and much more, and to make improvements to products. The biggest challenges here are speed, efficiency and also costs. 

What does Atomic Research mean?

For the inclined observer, there is the realisation that companies in crowded markets are fighting for the favour of customers and are making a genuine effort to identify changes in consumer behaviour with the help of market research methods and are trying to link these findings with vast amounts of further research data, reports, videos, qualitative and quantitative data, etc. in order to be able to provide the best offer. This poses great challenges for many companies. Often, there are silos of research and redundant data within departments because there is no consistent process for collecting and storing data. Atomic Research creates a remedy here!

Atomic Research creates relevant information

Atomic Research or Atomic UX-Research is defined as the breaking down of information and knowledge into "nuggets", where each nugget consists of relevant research information. While there are many ways to look at this concept, atomic research is simply described as a method of managing research knowledge. Atomic Research helps companies organise UX research and consumer knowledge into small, byte-sized units of information.

Atomic research has become an essential element of knowledge and research repositories. These research repositories help break down research silos, mitigate the negative impact of single knowledge and make insights available to all stakeholders. Atomic Research creates structure and a corporate taxonomy for conducting market research studies.

Atomic Research uses nuggets and offers market researchers and stakeholders important prerequisites for market research:

• Correctly recording and categorising research and findings
• Quickly and flexibly access research results and findings
• Reduce time for existing and future studies
• Drawing parallels between research techniques and methods
• Eliminate siled or scattered research information to make timely and accurate decisions

What does “nuggets” mean in the context of atomic research?

Nuggets in the context of Atomic Research are generally referred to as tagged and searchable research data, research results, reports, notes, assessments and project information. What is special here is that the filing of these nuggets follows a defined workflow, so that there is no uncontrolled growth here and all data and reports can actually be found again, even if they were filed a long time ago. It is important that the nuggets are archived according to a certain principle so that other departments and stakeholders can also access them quickly and easily.

Main components of nuggets

Nuggets are essentially divided into three main components that simplify the management of these information units in the context of atomic research. While these three components are not set in stone, they help to better and more effectively manage the concept of atomic research and emerge from a best practices approach that we observe in most market researchers. These components are:

• Observations: Documenting observations and subjective information is an essential part of market research. These observations include knowledge from the entire research process, from planning a study to interpreting the results.
• Evidence: The raw data from qualitative surveys as well as material from qualitative surveys, such as texts, videos, chat transcriptions, pictures, etc., are filed according to clear rules so that they can be easily retrieved. The evidence is derived from these elements.
• Tags: Tags form the core component of nuggets as they make the research and findings indexable and searchable. These components consist of information about methodology, research techniques, procedural information, and demographic information.

It is important to consider that nuggets are invaluable to multiple stakeholders. Tagged nuggets allow market researchers and stakeholders to leverage existing insights and draw conclusions from different studies. These nuggets are easiest to manage via an intelligent research repository.

→ Research repository by QuestionPro

Benefits and advantages of Atomic Research

The benefits and advantages of using Atomic Research by companies to overcome market research challenges are obvious:

• Accessibility: By using a research repository, companies and market researchers can perfect Atomic Research and document all relevant information in the form of byte-sized, catalogued and searchable units. This information can be easily searched and found by researchers, product managers, UX and design teams, stakeholders, senior management and others.
• A single source of truth: One of the biggest challenges of market researchers and other relevant stakeholders is the existence of insular knowledge and research silos. Atomic Research ensures acceptance and adoption by all relevant stakeholders, which helps create a single source of knowledge and truth. The research data is structured through the predefined workflows and management of findings in the atomic research design.
• Support in the continuous acquisition of knowledge: Another key benefit of Atomic Research is that all information and data is tagged with relevant meta-information from all stakeholders and enriched with their own insights. The ability to scale data and draw insights from multivariate research enables market researchers and stakeholders to better manage longitudinal studies and promote continuous insight generation. This helps reduce the time it takes to conduct research studies and provides a higher ROI in your research process.
• Defusing personal bias: How often do market researchers and decision-makers complain that studies conducted that may overlap are not usable because there is a personal bias in the reporting and results? Due to the lack of an organisation-wide process, isolated teams often conduct research and analyse it solely from the perspective of their respective division.
  While this process is not inherently flawed, the method is highly biased and limits the application of research elements to a broader audience and spectrum. With the application of the atomic research model, personal bias is largely eliminated.
• Create a research memory: Research and studies conducted over time become less significant because either the people who conducted them are no longer around or the research results are just pure data without any further information.
  The Atomic Research method, such as that used in QuestionPro's Research Repository, enables researchers to eliminate such circumstances in which data is lost. Knowledge tagged with the right tags and supporting information ensures that research lives on and can be accessed and even scaled at any time.

Basic principles of Atomic Research

Atomic Design in market research is a key differentiator between organisations that do not focus on the big picture and organisations that try to reuse market research as often as possible. Some basic principles of Atomic Research are:

• The Atomic Research Design consists of individual nuggets from market research.
• Atomic Research includes verifiable findings from market research, with hearsay completely excluded.
• Continuous research is required to obtain a comprehensive analysis of customer or user research.
• There is complete openness in the way research is conducted and managed.
• All stakeholders have the opportunity to access the research repository and define their own parameters that are relevant to them

Atomic Research: The ideal process

Atomic Research was developed independently by two UX research experts, Tomer Sharon and Daniel Pidcock, around the same time. They discovered at the same time that there are four main components in the Atomic Research method that are most useful in managing the Research Repository. These four components are experiments, facts, results and possibilities or conclusions. Let's look at this ideal Atomic Research process with examples to show you how to manage market research better and more efficiently.

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Atomic Research forces market research into a more evidence-based thought process. Atomic Research turns your research archive into a tool to expand your knowledge. It helps you identify knowledge gaps, break down research silos and make results quickly and easily accessible to all stakeholders and find information faster.

Software for implementing atomic research

The amount of research data is constantly growing in large companies, and therefore they need a dedicated solution to manage research data and insights more efficiently.

The limitations of the systems available to implement and manage Atomic Research for market research companies, as well as the many requests from our clients, have led us, as one of the world's technology leaders in market research software, to develop our own solution that meets all of Atomic Research's requirements.

These tools have been and are being developed with the close involvement of market researchers to support a seamless research process in larger organisations and companies and to conduct multiple studies across teams.

With a specialised atomic research tool like QuestionPro's Insights Hub, researchers can access insights faster. It also allows teams and stakeholders to manage market research in a simplified and defined process, resulting in significant time and cost savings. In addition, companies around the world benefit from a faster and easier transformation of data into insights.

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Software to support your atomic research processes: The QuestionPro Research Repository

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KEYWORDS OF THIS BLOG POST

Atomic Research | User research | UX research