User Research Note Taking - How To Get It Right [including Examples]

Home » When Taking Research Notes You Should » User Research Note Taking - How To Get It Right [including Examples]

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Why good note taking is important

High quality note taking lays the foundation for your research project. Often notes are the sole basis for data analysis and thus the ingredients we use to form insights. And just like in cooking, if the ingredients are subpar how can the outcomes be any good?

Done right, note taking will make the rest of the project run smoothly and produce solid results. Here are three properties that high-quality notes should have:

Complete

After putting in the effort to conduct the study it’s extremely frustrating to discover that important data is lacking because it wasn’t captured properly. At best, incomplete notes can be complemented based on the recording - at the expense of additional work. At worst, there is no recording or time to re-listen, which means you are unable to properly answer certain research questions.

Fact-based

Only if notes accurately represent what happened are they a reliable basis for analysis. As described in the introduction, note taking is primarily a mental activity of converting observations into condensed text. This conversion is prone to errors and bias. It's important to be mindful of that, since bias in notes may go undetected and can ultimately result in wrong conclusions and decisions. „It is of highest importance that the note-taker writes down what is said and not their interpretation. As a researcher, I need the original wording. Interpretation comes later.“ Photo of Nina Schacht Nina Schacht Freelance Qualitative Researcher

Formatted

Good notes come in a format that requires little effort to work with in the next stages, particularly data analysis and insight sharing. Concretely this means high information density so notes are quick and easy to read, consistency to allow comparisons across participants and a proper scannability to let you quickly find elements like quotes that are handy for a presentation.

Insufficient quality in notes often reveals itself only in later stages of the project when they can’t be adjusted easily. Thus getting it right from the start will pay off later.

With the properties of good notes in mind, let’s talk about how to achieve this. There are two aspects to consider to make note taking successful: The preparation and the writing itself.

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