Taking notes

Writing up notes on usability tests

On my diploma course we learnt how to take notes – how to highlight key observations from recorded usability test. But the importance of taking notes is vital for any research or key interaction with a user.

Rationale:

Gain great insights into the users behaviour and have written access to video footage

Process:

• Focus on the goals, behaviours, context and pain points for each user

• I created a key in the footer so i could flag the following behaviour as a quick reference:

  • Noteworthy behaviour / comment

  • flagging software behaviour (error / odd)

  • Negative interaction / pain point

  • Positive interaction

  • Q. Question asked by moderator

• …and then style up the notes accordingly

• I made sure I included time stamps at regular points

• I included verbatim quotes

• I summarised at the end

How it went:

Writing the notes really makes you study the user in depth and look for all the positive and negative interactions. It definitely helps you spot things they don’t verbalise, that you can seem the pondering over. Does their behaviour match the considerations they say they have about [in this instance] about booking a flight when asked at the beginning of the usability test?

It took a while to format the document, but I can use this as a template going forward and it will be much quicker next time.

I found it really handy to reference these notes later on in the product development journey, especially when writing up the post-it notes for the Affinity Diagram, and also the customer journey map. The summary has proved the most useful