SELinux novice question about fcontext for a local common/shared directory

Red Hat Enterprise version 8.8
1. We are required to have SELinux enabled and enforcing.
2. We are required to have users assigned to a role other than "unconfined_u" (We semanage login move them from "unconfined_u" into "user_u")
3. We have a working requirement for a team of analysts to access, read/write/execute files in the same directory ( /data/common).

Everything works FINE until we set SELinux to "Enforcing."
In enforcing mode, the analysts cannot read/write or even list files unless we set the semanage fcontext to a file-context-type other than default_t. We have tried multiple reassignments to various defined file types. We can never get to the point of user_u having WRITE access, unless we use "user_home_t" which seems intuitively a bad idea.

Is there a preexisting SELINUX CONTEXT FILE TYPE that user_u selinux users can access fully, other than "user_home_t"?

It would seem logical that there would be a corresponding user_t file type, but...

When I try this:
semanage fcontext -m -t user_t /data/testfile
I get this:
ValueError: Type user_t is invalid, must be a file or device type