Dana Chisnell

Tag: note taking

  • Observers are your friends

      (This article was originally published on May 30, 2008. This is a refresh.)   Research that you do alone ends up in only your head. No matter how good the report, slide deck, or highlights video, not all the knowledge gets transferred to your teammates. This isn’t your fault. It just is. So what…

  • Easier data gathering: Techniques of the pros

    In an ideal world, we’d have one person moderating a user research session and at least one other person taking notes or logging data. In practice it often just doesn’t work out that way. The more people I talk to who are doing user research, the more often I hear from experienced people that they’re…

  • Making it easy to collect the data you want to collect

    As I have said before, taking notes is rife with danger. It’s so tempting to just write down everything that happens. But you probably can’t deal with all that data. First, it’s just too much. Second, it’s not organized. Let’s look at an example research question: Do people make more errors on one version of…

  • Data collecting: Tips and tricks for taking notes

    A common mistake people make when they’re new to conducting usability tests is taking verbatim notes. Note taking for summative tests can be pretty straightforward. For those you should have benchmark data that you’re comparing against or at least clear success criteria. In that case, data collecting could (and probably should) be done mostly by the…