Notes on taking notes (in user interviews)

Jul 11

This is a note I send to anyone on my team who I’m asking to take notes in a user interview. If that’s you, thanks so much for your help! 💖

Being a note-taker in a user interview is an important role — perhaps more than you might initially think. Being asked to take notes in a normal meeting is fairly uncool imo, but in this situation, it’s extremely valuable and can be the foundation that allows your team to do accurate, unbiased, fast, affordable (read: actually happens) research.

Here’s some notes on how to do note-taking well:

👑 VERBATIM IS KING 👑

The more you can type out a transcript of what they’re saying as they talk, the better! ie — type exactly what they say, as they say it. It’s more possible than you think.
It’s totally fine to have typos
It’s totally fine to have no punctuation
Dot points are great
You can skip writing down any ums and ahs and “yeah it’s nice weather here in Oregon!” intros
In general though, assume everything they talk about is relevant and worth transcribing — sometimes at the start of a sentence you think it’s not going anywhere interesting and then it comes around, ya know?
If they talk too fast and you lose the trail, it’s fine to just make a new dot point and start again from where they’re at. I promise these notes will still be 100000 times more useful and valuable than whoever is running the research having to manually fix 1500+ words of computer-generated transcript 🤖🔫

Why verbatim?

Verbatim notes are a primary source. Notes filtered through someone’s interpretation are a secondary source.

We can allow ourselves the full breadth of analysis later by accurately collecting the primary source now.

The way you interpret what someone says in the moment can be different to the way you understand it coming back later and reading/hearing it again.

From experience, I’ve often gone back to notes the next day and realised “oh, I totally thought they meant X, but now I read it again I realise they meant XYZ.” Taking “interpreted notes” can be a fast way to bring biases into research. (A common but insidious one: I just heard what I expected to hear)

Being precise about user’s words is valuable.

What words do they use? How exactly do they frame things? The more we know this, the more we can reflect those words in the product, and the more the product will feel like it “just gets it”.

Automatic transcription apps are a bit 💩

I do record with Otter.ai — but the auto transcription from there is pretty muddy and takes a ton of working through to get them accurate. Verbatim notes taken by someone in the moment are much, much higher quality and easier to parse. Having someone take notes in the call means the synthesis can happen probably week earlier than without. Using something like Rev.com also works, but that increases the cost of each research round by $500+ so can be a blocker to research… which is bad

It’s kinda easier to listen and focus if you’re taking notes, right?

Perhaps not a universal experience, but I find it a lot more engaging to take notes through an interview I’m observing than to just sit there silently and listen.

If we agree that one of the core values a researcher brings is to gradually increase the user-centredness and user understanding within a team over time — and that listening directly to users does that — then it would follow that doing things to allow observers to listen more effectively would therefore move us towards that goal…