As you take notes, it’s easy to think that everything you hear and/or see is important, but this makes it extremely difficult to analyze the information across all your participants. You can use your research objectives to create categories you can reference as you take notes to make sure you are capturing the most salient information. Focus on the need-to-know information, not the nice-to-know information.
Conducting user research often results in a pretty hefty amount of information. To stay organized throughout this process, spend some time upfront deciding how you’ll collect your notes. Using Dovetail will help consolidate your data as well as facilitates highlighting and tagging content. Doing this makes it easier for your team to collaborate by adding their own notes and observations, and collecting everything in a central place will keep things organized and consistent.
Here are some note-taking resources to use, in addition to Dovetail, depending on the type of study you're conducting:
A note-taking best practice is to have at least one note-taker for each research session. Having a note-taker helps by:
After scheduling your sessions with participants, promote the sessions within section or stage group Slack channels to solicit note-takers.
Twitter and LinkedIn are great platforms for engaging with our users and sometimes they can also prove to be a goldmine for user feedback. However, when using data received from these sources, we should proceed with caution and follow certain steps to avoid arriving at biased insights. It's important to ensure the feedback is not analyzed outside its original context.
For more information around the guidelines for engagement on social media platforms, visit the Team Member Social Media Policy and Guidelines page.
