Taking Research Notes for UX
Note: Many thanks to the professors and mentors I have had that taught me the techniques I describe here, including Shaowen Bardzell, and Barbara Dennis.
One of the more challenging tasks for a UX researcher is keeping accurate notes during an observation session. The researcher must often keep accurate notes while observing, interviewing, and even taking images of the space.
The perfect solution to this problem is often to have multiple researchers in the space. But a lot of UX departments might not have resources to provide multiple researchers, and as an academic, I’ve learned that doing a study as cheaply as possible often means going into a complex observation alone. For me, the key to doing this well lies in organization.
In this post, I’m going to detail my own notetaking process, and how I organize things. It’s served me well over the course of the hundreds of hours of observations and interviews I’ve conducted.
Some notes:
- There are different standards for academics and professionals when gathering data. My techniques blend mindsets from my experience as a Master’s HCI student, a Ph.D. HCI student, and my independent design projects. Depending on your aim, these might be more or less rigorous than your requirements.
- My approach changes based on whether I’m doing an interview or an observation. For interviews, I generally just take notes and audio record the subject. Observations are more complicated, in which I need images of the space, the participant activities, and other data.
Organizing your Research Notes
When writing my notes, I use a simple format that allows for some additional data to be captured. As soon as I open a page, I draw a line on the left side of the page, creating a thin column on the left, and a wider column on the right.
That left column will contain timestamps based on either the time of day or in relation to the timer on your recording device.
By keeping track of the time within the notes, I am able to connect these notes to the other recordings I am making, creating a layered data record. This ensures much more coverage for the event.
Before entering the space, you should do your best to know what you’re trying to capture. Do you want to just hear what people are saying? Or is it important to see what they’re doing as well? Are images good enough, or is video required? Will you be asking questions, or just observing? Where will you be in the room in relation to the subjects? Can you move around, or will you be forced to sit in one location?
Triangulate Your Data
Whenever possible, supplement your notes with other data recording techniques. For observations, I try to have at least 3 different recording techniques: note-taking, audio, and images or video.
This takes some practice, but I have a couple of different setups depending on what equipment I have available, or what the space looks like. I always have at least the following:
- A notebook with pen
- My smartphone
In some cases, I might also have additional equipment:
- Zoom H4n audio recorder
- GoPro camera with tripod
Each piece has a specific purpose. The notebook and pen should be obvious, they are there to take notes. The Zoom H4n is a high-quality audio recording device. In the past, I’ve used it to record podcasts. I prefer this recorder because it has a lot of flexibility. It includes various microphone placements, recording qualities, compression types, and also two XLR plugs to turn the device into a mini soundboard.
The GoPro, when it is used records the entire space. This is helpful when doing observations. I like the GoPro for this because it will record for hours at a time with no babysitting, it’s small and unobtrusive, and the model I have allows me to control it via my phone. Combining the video with the audio gives me a view of everything that happened, and allows me to connect participant actions to comments they made during the session.
The smartphone is the multi-tasker of the team, it often does multiple things in any research session. First, it’s most basic purpose is often to act as a clock. I personally wear a mechanical wristwatch, but if you don’t have one, keeping the phone nearby can act as a replacement. Second, it often acts as my recording device. If I know I won’t need to take pictures, I generally just default to my phone as a recorder.
If I do need to take images, I prefer having a second recording device. Trying to use the phone to do both can lead to a bad recording. (Imagine hearing your finger tap on the phone every 10–15 seconds while you’re trying to transcribe your interview)
During observations, I have my Zoom H4N recorder going and use my phone to take pictures, and then write notes to map out the course of the observation.
The real value of this method is that when I import the photos from my phone to my computer (at least on my iPhone), the creation date and time are embedded in the photo. I can then line up those times with the times in my notes, and connect each image to a moment in my notes.
And hopefully, it goes without saying that you should always have these devices fully charged before entering a research session. Part of my kit is a set of charging cables and a small AA battery charger with 4 batteries. This way I can charge everything at my desk before going on to the research session.
Capture What You Can, but Know What You’re Capturing
Before entering the space, you should do your best to know what you’re trying to capture. Do you want to just hear what people are saying? Or is it important to see what they’re doing as well? Are images good enough, or is video required? Will you be asking questions, or just observing? Where will you be in the room in relation to the subjects? Can you move around, or will you be forced to sit in one location?
If possible, I always try to visit the space before I perform observations or interviews there. This is not always possible, but even 15 minutes of advance exploration can help your note-taking for later review.
When doing observations, I like to sketch out space in my notes so that I know approximately where people are sitting, and how the room is set up. The goal is always to get the richest data possible, which requires you to get as much information as possible.
Know your goals
The most important aspect of any note-taking is to understand what your goals are for the notes. What purpose do they serve? Is this meant to be an accurate record of every event that happened within the space? Or is it just a supplement to other data you’re capturing, like audio, video, or images?
If notes are the only thing you are capturing, then that places a large burden on your abilities to see what’s happening and write about it quickly. I personally never count entirely on my ability to take notes to accurately capture the space.
Your Notes Only Have to Make Sense to You
In rare cases, you might have to hand your notes to someone else, but in a situation where you’re the only researcher available to perform an observation, it’s likely you will also have to translate your notes into some kind of report for various audiences.
This is actually a big advantage because it means you can develop your own shorthand that uses symbols and other characters that are meaningful to your experience. With practice, these symbols will become second nature and greatly speed up your note-taking.
In addition, different types of observations can make use of different sets of symbols. A couple of more specific tips:
- Keep your symbols consistent — There’s nothing worse than looking back at your notes from a month ago, and not remembering if you meant that a subject pointed at someone, or drew on the whiteboard.
- Keep your symbols simple — The goal of these symbols is to reduce writing time, any more than a couple of marks on the page is probably not to your advantage.
Here’s a set of symbols that I developed when doing observations of student design teams. In this case, I was interested in observing how they conducted meetings. This included things like when they showed their laptop to others to illustrate a point when they pointed at something or someone, and when they moved to the whiteboard to write something.
The rounded top symbol indicates a person pointed at something (E points at the whiteboard). The symbol with the pointed tips indicates that someone has used a dry erase marker. (The pointed symbol is the same shape as a classic whiteboard marker tip).
When I would note that someone was pointing at something or writing something, I would try to take a picture each time in order to triangulate that piece of data.
I also have a simple symbol for a laptop (an L slanted backward, to look like an opened laptop from the side), and others. Depending on your situation you can develop any number of symbols that only make sense to you.
Symbols that you create only have to meet two standards:
- They must be quick and easy to draw.
- They must make sense to you.
That’s it. That’s the list.
Conclusion
For me, my notes are essential to my process. If I just have the recording, I can make do, but having the notes speeds me up a lot. I can focus on particularly interesting moments, cherry-pick those for quick transcription, and then go deeper on another pass.
The toughest part of doing a good job taking notes is ensuring that you’re present in the moment of research and able to make sense of what’s happening, and if needed, guide the interview to the next topic, or be ready to see what happens next in the observation. With a strong plan and a consistent note-taking strategy, I find that this becomes much easier. I don’t have to worry about the exact words the subject is saying, because I can count on the recording. I don’t have to worry about what exactly is drawn on the whiteboard because I can count on the images I’m taking to tell the whole story.
And you’re not perfect. There will be some things you’ll miss, and maybe even some important things. But having a consistent, detailed setup keeps those kinds of mistakes to a minimum.
