Usability Testing Hack #1: Notability by Gingerlabs

Sepide Ghate
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

Let’s face it, note taking during usability testing is hard. You can get so wrapped up in being a notetaker that you have difficulty engaging the participants or following up. You could also fail to capture important comments because the pace of a discussion can be faster than your notetaking speed.

If you decide to rely solely on video or audio recording and not to take notes during the session, you must either listen to the recording and make notes or send the recording out for transcription which can be very expensive considering that there will not be useful insight in every second of it.

One economical and less time consuming solution to that is time stamping at the time of occurrence of anything with notable significance (e.g. when the user is confused or frustrated, pressed the wrong button or gives an insightful opinion). That means after the completion of the session, you can quickly refer back to the timestamped points of the video or audio recording and analyse information.

Notability, the iOS app, seems to be the perfect tool for time stamping as well as note taking an much more. In Notability, you can audio record your session and draw, scribble or take notes simultaneously. That means you can audio record the session with Notability -as well as video record with any other tool if needed.

An Audio note in Notability with 3 bookmarks

To create a bookmark on the audio recording when the user does and says something notable, you can draw simple shapes, e.g. a little circle when the user is confused or a star when pressed the wrong button and so on. Once the recording is complete, you can have access to the audio files with the exact locations of the bookmarks you have created!

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Sepide Ghate

Written by

UX Researcher @ TestCentric

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