In our previous article, “Unlocking UX Success: The Power of Knowledge Management,” we explored the key challenges UX professionals face and how effective knowledge management can address them:

• Doing More with Less: Increasing budget, resources, and time constraints require team members to handle more work with inflexible deadlines.
• Improving Collaboration and Communication: The shift to remote work has heightened the need for better digital collaboration and communication within and across teams.
• Scaling Research and Design: There is a need to continue scaling research and design processes, tools, and artifacts to commoditize where possible, allowing teams to focus on complex challenges.

By managing UX knowledge effectively, we can overcome these challenges, improve transparency and accountability, democratize research and design, and leverage AI and automation for a competitive advantage.

In this post, we’re talking about best practices that are necessary to effectively manage UX knowledge, ensuring it is accessible, usable, and impactful for driving innovation and improving collaboration within organizations.

The process for managing explicit knowledge includes the following steps:

• Discovery – Identifying knowledge gaps or available knowledge that hasn’t been documented
• Capture – Exactly what it sounds like – documenting the critical information
• Process – Cleaning it up, making it repeatable and reusable
• Share – Disseminating the knowledge for wider access
• Use – Putting the knowledge into practice and ritualizing it’s use

The process is straightforward. There are many different variations of this diagram available on the web, but they all have some flavor of these steps.

The first 3 to 4 steps are the most well-understood, and those involved in this process feel most comfortable. However, the most significant difficulty lies between sharing and using (steps 4 and 5). We will share what those hurdles look like and how to move past them a bit later.

There are somewhat similar but different processes for managing explicit and tactic knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is typically shared from person to person rather than from artifact to person. Common tacit knowledge-sharing vehicles include Interviews, work collaboration, mentorship, workshops, forums, and community. The tacit knowledge management process includes the following steps:

• Create a place for informal knowledge-sharing
• Foster engagement – collaboration and communication
• Monitor and nurture
• Identify and encourage subject matter experts (SMEs) who have that knowledge to share it with others
• Index knowledge – Improve findability and determine the potential for further codification

The tacit knowledge management process also gets harder the further you move along the steps in the process.

Tacit knowledge sharing – influencing factors

There are four factors that greatly influence whether or not tacit knowledge gets shared. Keep in mind that Tacit knowledge is typically shared from person to person rather than from artifact to person, so it has a very human element to it.

• TRUST: Trust is an important prerequisite for tacit knowledge sharing because, without trust, people are not willing to be vulnerable and to share. People build status based on their knowledge and need to have trust to feel comfortable giving others their knowledge-based power. Trust is a major enabler for sharing tacit knowledge.
• SELF-EFFICACY: Self-efficacy – is one’s confidence in one’s ability to achieve a specific performance goal, and having a higher level of self-efficacy builds one’s confidence in one’s ability to share knowledge with others and, therefore, impacts one’s motivation to share. If people believe in their ability to share knowledge, they will be more motivated to share it with others. Self-efficacy is another major enabler of tacit knowledge sharing.
• IT SUPPORT: This is another critical enabler, as it involves ensuring that the proper infrastructure is in place to facilitate frictionless collaboration and communication across the organization.
• KNOWLEDGE TACITNESS: Knowledge tacitness refers to the degree of difficulty in articulating and transferring knowledge. The more tacit the knowledge, the harder it is to articulate and share. But not all tacit knowledge is completely tacit—there are degrees of tacitness.

These influencing factors are discussed in greater detail in a study by Juarun Wang and Jin Yang called, An Empirical Study of Employee’s Tacit Knowledge Sharing Behavior.

Explicit knowledge artifacts

Artifacts are the outputs of the KM process and are the heart of a standard knowledge management system. Some examples include playbooks, research reports, methodology or process documentation, role descriptions, or brand guidelines. Anything that can be documented and has somewhat durable value. But it is not enough to present the artifact itself; you must make it a KM asset. What does that mean? It means wrapping it up with all the necessary information to make it findable, consumable, and usable.

This is an example from a project we did two years ago. Specific details have been hidden by turning it into lorum ipsum, but you should still get the gist.

(1) You have a preview of the artifact itself, how well it has been rated by others who have used it; (2) a description of the asset’s common use cases; (3) you have information on its intended use, (4) a list of audiences for which it is intended to serve, (5) a list of other variations on that artifact, guidance documentation, frequently asked questions (FAQs) and examples others have submitted that use this artifact. (6) There is contact information for 1-2 individuals that can help you learn how to use it. You can submit feedback or a best practice example and write reviews. Providing this richer context makes it much more likely that a knowledge artifact is understood and will be adopted. These mechanisms also help to make the knowledge management process easier for those in charge while keeping the content evergreen and relevant for those who need it.

Tacit knowledge artifacts

Tacit knowledge often cannot be represented in an artifact, but you can create a wayfinding knowledge container that points you toward where to find it. Employee profiles (a directory), searchable forums or communities, and comments fields are all wayfinding sources. Let’s use employee profiles as an example….If you create robust employee profiles, then it can help people find others who are likely to have the tacit knowledge they are interested in.

Looking at the example profile of Zoey Stark provided, in addition to Zoe’s standard contact information, we know what communities of practice Zoey belongs to; we see her skills and expertise, the products and projects she has worked on, and any publications she has written. With this information, I have a good idea of what she is knowledgeable about. Building richer (and more searchable) profiles will ALSO provide access to a broader and more diverse set of perspectives to draw upon.

Tools for managing explicit knowledge

Effective knowledge management is as much about the system used to store the information as it is about the knowledge itself. You might have great stuff to share, but if it’s difficult to find or use, then all that great information doesn’t help anyone.
Typical explicit knowledge management tools include:

• Corporate Intranets
• Wiki
• Document management systems
• Content management systems
• Databases/Data Warehouse

I’m sure you are all pretty familiar with these types of tools. When identifying potential KM tools within your organization, if there isn’t a required tool, use whatever tool/system has the lowest barrier to entry and that people will use.

Tools for managing tacit knowledge

Managing tacit knowledge is about creating places that enable sharing from person to person. Common tact knowledge management tools include:

• Social networks
• Communities of practice
• Forums
• MS Teams, Slack, SharePoint communities
• Jira, Github
• Company directory

These tools help employees coordinate and quickly share knowledge. Don’t expect to find a one-size-fits-all solution, as you will probably need to leverage more than one tool. When selecting the tools you want to start with, make sure they support discovery methods (e.g., enable keywords, include canned queries, and make sure you have powerful search capabilities).

In most organizations, there are a variety of tools available and used to store and manage both explicit and tacit knowledge. User experience knowledge must be accessible and easy to find for anyone in the organization, not just the people performing UX work, rather than creating a centralized repository for explicit UX knowledge and hoping that others will come to it. It may be better to start by identifying the core KM tools and repositories the rest of the business uses and figuring out which UX knowledge needs to be inserted into the most relevant locations. Because UX knowledge will likely be spread across tools and systems, the most important thing is to develop a common information organizing structure and a set of taxonomies that can be applied consistently across tools and systems. These structures and taxonomies can also be applied in your tacit knowledge-sharing tool.

This addresses the earlier gap when discussing knowledge management processes, specifically the difficulty of moving between steps 4—Sharing and 5—Use in the explicit knowledge management process. The concepts laid out above are from Julie Dirkson, a fantastic expert on learning enablement, in her book Design for How People Learn.

Let’s talk about context – there are several contextual factors that can impact the success of your knowledge management efforts:

• • • Culture—Is there a culture of learning within your organization? Are Individuals encouraged to see themselves as knowledge stewards and subject matter experts?
    • Structure – Team vs. Business Unit vs. Org Wide—Within these lenses, knowledge artifacts, processes, and systems might need to be different. We have to be aware of how to navigate these differences and how to support people working within them. For example, there are types of knowledge and documentation that are only relevant to a specific product team context.
    • KM Approach – Is KM an org-wide goal that has an org-wide approach? Where are there clear examples and expectations of where info gets stored and what your knowledge artifacts look like? Or is it happening in pockets of the organization where each group is doing its own thing?

Lastly, there is Knowledge Origin—top down and bottom up—which depends on the source of the knowledge or expertise. Some knowledge is only trusted if it comes from the bottom up—the experts themselves. Other types of knowledge can be driven top-down. You need to know which point of origin will bring success and extract the knowledge from that vantage point.

1. Knowledge is the lifeblood of any organization.
2. Knowledge management is a well-established concept.
3. The methods and tools we use to manage knowledge evolve.
4. A successful knowledge management solution needs to be tailored to the needs and the culture of the organization

Best Practices

1. Engage the right people
2. Support both Explicit and Tacit processes
3. Select the tools people want to use
4. Turn artifacts into knowledge assets
5. Activate learning outcomes
6. Account for organizational context