A step-by-step guide to user research note taking

The hardest part about taking notes during research sessions is that it requires you to listen, make observations, and record information simultaneously. This takes significant cognitive effort, and practise — making easy to miss out on key points without adequate preparation.

Familiarity with the research topic, and a structured framework to take notes can help reduce the cognitive effort. Familiarity with the topic means that information gathered “makes sense” more easily, and a structured framework gives you the ability to quickly record relevant information without getting overwhelmed.

Prepare a discussion guide. A discussion guide is a set of questions and topics that you would like to discuss with a participant during your research session. It typically consists of an introduction, warm-up questions, research questions and a debrief. You can use it a reference tool to help facilitate conversation. And by leaving blank spaces between between questions, you can take note of key points that that come up during the session more easily.

AEIOU stands for Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects, and Users.

Activities includes actions with specific goals in mind, and the processes performed to achieve them.

Environments details the context and characteristics of the space where activities are being observed.

Interactions includes both interpersonal and person-artifact interactions.

Objects catalogues the items within the environment and how they are used.

Users includes the people within the environment that are being observed.

POEMS stands for People, Objects, Environments, Messages, and Services.

People — The demographics, roles, behavioral traits, and quantity of people in the environment

Objects — The items the people are interacting with, including furniture, devices, machines, appliances, tools, etc.

Environments — Observations about the architecture, lighting, furniture, temperature, atmosphere, etc.

Messages — The tone of the language or commonly used phrases in tag lines, social/professional interactions, and/or environmental messages

Services — All services, apps, tools, and frameworks used

In an ideal scenario, it’s best to have at least one person being assigned the role of a dedicated note-taker. This makes it easy for the note taker to focus on keeping a record of what’s being discussed, while freeing up the moderator to guide the conversation.

In scenarios where you’re conducting the research session alone, you can try the following to make some extra time for note taking, without breaking the flow of the session:

Rephrase what you hear from the participant — this shows them that you’re actively listening to the conversation, and acts as a prompt to elaborate their perspective.

Get comfortable with long pauses — which may feel uncomfortable at first, but it allows the participant to gather their thoughts as well

Ask for an example — this can be really helpful because it gives you more time in the same context.

Immediately after each session take 10 mins to review the discussion guide and add notes you may have missed out on during the session. Elaborate the points you’ve written down in a way that anyone who read your notes is able to understand what you learned from the session. And add quotes to keep verbatims separate from your observations or remarks about the session.

Synthesise everyone’s observations in a shared document, format its content and disseminate the notes so everyone walks away with the same picture of what they learned.

The purpose of note-taking is to keep track of what you learn. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to how you store your notes after your research sessions.

You can keep you user research notes organised by following a consistent naming convention, and folder structure to the data that you gather from each research session.

To get the most value out of your research notes, you can consider adopting a dedicated solution for your user research that makes it easy to organise learnings in your notes, and share them with your team. By organising learnings from each session into buckets, you can start finding patterns in what’s common across your research sessions.