How you can take better notes during user research

Being the sole interviewer in a user research session can be strenuous, on both the mind and fingers. But the benefits of taking great notes will save you and your team a tremendous amount of time and headaches turning your notes into learnings, and your learnings into action.

With 10 minutes of planning before you start your research project, you can take notes that will:

• Ensure consistency in the note-taking style, no matter who is taking them
• Significantly reduce the amount of time required to analyze them for themes and insights
• Make your notes directly usable for your intended output

Set a consistent style

While everybody will have their own preferred method of taking notes during research, if you have more than one person taking notes on a project, this will create real inconsistencies in your notes.

Before you start your project determine whether you want notes written in:

• Point form or paragraph-style
• First-person or third-person perspective

This will give you a consistent output that will make your notes immediately usable.

Tag notes as you take them

Depending on the type of research you are running you will have some sense of what types of feedback you are looking for. Running ethnography, you can expect participant to discuss pain points they have with their experience. Testing prototypes you can expect participants to uncover usability issues.

Defining tags for these types of feedback before you start your project will allow you to identify important notes as you create them. This will save you time analyzing your notes afterwards because most of your important notes will already be flagged.

With Field Guide, we include a suggested tags for you to use during your tests, depending on the type of test you are running.

• For ethnography: #need, #painpoint, #activity, #touchpoint and #quote
• For screen-based research: #issue, #comprehension, #preference, #effort and #quote

This isn’t intended for you to draw conclusions on the fly, instead, it will allow you to immediately surface the most important feedback upon completing your research.

Write notes for your output

When starting a new project, take some time to understand how the output will be applied. Doing so, will make them immediately useful for your team, without a dramatic amount of editing required.

If you are running usability testing on a website, write your notes so they provide full context for your dev team to act on.

“This is the action participant took, they expected this result, and instead this happened.”

A note in this format can be directly added to your bug tracker.

You want to do your best to stay in the moment with the participant during research, so you don’t want to be too focused on note-taking. By taking a few minutes before starting a project to plan your note taking, you can get awesome, functional notes, without feverishly tapping away on your laptop for extended periods of time.

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