Taking Notes
Taking notes for user interviews can seem like a waste of time.
Etched in my memory is the first user research interview I did for a class project on contextual inquiry. The interview was in the evening; I spent the entirety of next morning and early afternoon going through the recording, jotting notes. It was humdrum and laborious, and no one was going to reward me for it.
After completing design school, working as a designer and researcher, jotting interview notes still felt tedious. The act of typing, word for word, what I had already written on paper, seemed antiquated and I often paused and wondered if I could be doing better things with my time in the era of automation.
While I still occasionally wrestle with the boredom of jotting notes, I’ve come to accept that the only way out is through. Designers can come to terms with the boredom by changing our relationship with it and remembering why note taking is important. Hopefully this piece will help with that, without getting into the nuts-and-bolts, the what and how of user research and documentation, and by focusing more on the why.
Note that when you see the word conversation, it means interview. I prefer saying conversation, especially when I am responsible for recruiting participants. Interview evokes job interviews, at least to me. It implies asking questions; an interview is not an interrogation. A cardinal rule I have followed since my days conducting qualitative research for my master’s degree is that in research, participants' comfort trumps everything else. When trying to recruit research participants, asking if we could interview them doesn't exactly make them comfortable. The word conversation without context, however, may be confusing, so I won't eschew interview and use interview and conversation interchangeably.
One reason why taking notes tends to fall between the cracks is that writing during a conversation is not always viable. It depends on the researcher’s preference, but in remote user research, I find typing while engaging with participants nearly impossible. Writing on paper, on the other hand, comes naturally: it doesn't interfere with listening but enhances it.
In some contexts, note taking may be physically impractical, inappropriate, or both.
Let's say you are visiting a store, researching customers buying sports gear. Chances are, you’re standing up, tablet or phone in one hand, with the interview script or a prototype you intend to show to the research participants. A customer is walking towards the exit; you didn't want to interrupt her shopping experience, and so you approach the customer as she is leaving. It is safe to assume she is eager to get to her friends who are waiting outside but is willing to indulge you. In this time-sensitive situation, taking notes is both physically impractical (remember, your hands are occupied) and certainly inappropriate.
In contrast, taking notes while talking to domestic violence survivors for my master's dissertation was very appropriate, since writing and documentation are the rule rather than the exception at a one stop center. And the chairs in the waiting area made it physically easy. Similarly, years later, jotting "copious notes" based on a senior's briefing during their conversations with experts on sexuality education, as we sat around the table in the conference room, was typical.
Sometimes taking your time to jot notes means missing out on other potential conversations. This may be good or bad depending on the objectives of the research study and the designer's preference. In my experience, it is not entirely bad. On a visit to a retail store for a comparative research study, I found it physically impossible and inappropriate to jot notes during conversations. But luckily, between conversations, I could retreat to a corner with a desk and scribble notes from memory in a little notebook I carried. The time spent writing notes instead of recruiting more participants meant thinning the sample. I took the risk, given the alternative was forgetting the last conversation. I compensated for the thin sample by increasing my visits to the store.
Another reason why note taking is easy to ignore is that, like most research activities, it is labour intensive. And only because we think we need to do it alone without help. Like most design research activities, interviewing is meant to be a team endeavour, with the team comprising of an interviewer and a note taker.
Any one, regardless of position or power in the team hierarchy, can volunteer to be a note taker. The intern who doesn't feel quite ready for contextual inquiry but is eager to watch and learn. Or the design lead who wants to do something useful with the spare time on their calendar. I won't go as far as to suggest that note taking helps democratise research; whether research can or should be democratised is debatable. But without question, note taking is an equaliser and thus has the potential to build a culture of respect for the labour that research demands.
When I hear a designer is about to conduct qualitative research, I offer to take notes for them with enthusiasm that is hard to hide. My reasons are selfish. Note taking helps me relax like no other design activity. It gives the prefrontal cortex a break; it doesn't demand intellectual labour. All it requires is faithfully transcribing what is being said, while the interviewer does the heavy lifting. The note taker has the authority to intervene if the conversation digresses a lot, which is rare. And when the conversation ends, she can touch on a topic the interviewer unwittingly passed over. This is easy to spot since she has been paying attention; writing is another word for deep attention.
And while jotting notes can be a slog in other contexts, here it is the opposite. The note taker gets to disappear, be a fly on the wall, and witness a conversation between two humans. What could be more interesting than that? Observing the ‘interviewer’ and ‘interviewee’ navigate an inherently unequal power dynamic from their unique situated positionalities teaches the note taker something fundamental about the art of interviewing that can’t be learned elsewhere.
Designers beware, your enthusiasm to take notes may be considered odd, and even threatening, if your culture values conformity and defaults to thought-terminating clichés such as, this is how we always do things. If you're aiming to blend in, then your enthusiasm will not help you blend in. Taking copious notes implies labour, which in the absence of critical thinking, may be very intimidating for some designers.
I love the solidarity implicit in the act of offering to take notes for someone. Letting a colleague know I am willing to spare time for a seemingly trivial task like note taking, one that wouldn't make me shine but disappear into the role of a sidekick, conveys that research is as important as other design activities on my calendar. It is a tacit acknowledgment that the work of research demands labour, which many a time is invisible. It says (or I hope it does), my colleague’s effort is anything but trivial — it is, in fact, brave if they had to move many levers to get research approved — and I have their back.
Offering to be the humble note taker is a radical act that shifts the focus from the individual to the collective, and a collective focus is indispensable to research. In an agency or startup culture with a default bias for individual heroism over mutuality and collaboration, where fewer resources are allocated to research, the mere act of teaming up with a researcher to take interview notes can be a significant step forward for research. It is a seed that, with care and nurturing, has the potential to blossom into a research-centric culture.
There is another prevalent reason why designers take notes lightly. Jotting notes is easy to bypass when we have access to interview recordings. In my experience, the chances of participants giving informed consent to be recorded have been 50-50. Self-assured designers who claim to have recorded every single interview make me very nervous. (Research ethics can be vastly overlooked in startup/agency contexts.) Although I don’t have a preference, I confess that when participants consent to being recorded, it relieves the stress of multitasking and frees me to focus on the conversation. That said, having the chance to record isn’t an excuse not to write notes after the conversation. Recordings are the salt, not the egg. They make note taking easy and help with accuracy but they are not a substitute for notes.
Even in conversations where the participant consents to be recorded, my hands inevitably reach for a notepad, lest I miss the interesting bits. Usually spoken in local language (which has been Hindi, for me, but can be any other language for you), they are phrases too compelling to ignore; I call them pointers because they are memorable and point the interviewer towards the interview. It is hard to pinpoint what makes a phrase memorable. It isn't logic that takes notice of these phrases, but the designer's intuition, which gets sharper with each interview. What helps though, if you’re not intuitively inclined, is paying attention to words carrying strong emotion, which in the participant's language become very hard to ignore. Pointers are memorable for a reason: they have the potential to become observations or insights that illuminate the opportunity space, even if the designer does not realise their significance yet.
A set of three or four pointers can frame an entire conversation. It can serve as a mini interview snapshot, if I may, coming handy when the designer least expects. (Bear in mind that this is not a substitute for notes. It is the bare minimum and yet, adds tremendous value.) Imagine this: A designer working at a startup with low UX maturity is carrying out a fully remote qualitative user research study for a product. He is the entire research team for this product. The PM surprises the designer with a debrief at a standup just the day after the first interview. The designer hasn't had a chance to compile notes, and he says so. The PM says she understands and that’s that. When, a week later, the PM requests a debrief in the next standup, the designer has the same response. By now, he has conducted several interviews and is overwhelmed by the hours of (recorded) conversations to transcribe and make sense of. In future debriefs, no one mentions research; they forget about it.
This is bad. A designer who heretofore has invested effort into making research happen, now risks squandering this effort without meaning to.
Even in the most research unfriendly environments, the designer has many opportunities to visibilize research. An astute designer uses standups, let’s say, as an opportunity to share the pointers with the team. Doing so takes little effort yet has high dividends. The pointers, because they are memorable, draw the attention of the design team. Like a thread, they connect the current interaction between designer and PM to the next, so the next time they meet, research is unlikely to fall through the cracks and very likely to be on the design team's radar. (This isn’t to say note taking only benefits the team; it is equally important for the designer.)
I love especially that relatively low-effort activities such as pointers, interview snapshots and note taking enable designers to own our value. Sara Boettcher suggests that instead of trying to prove our value, if designers start to own our value, we can show up and create from a place of agency. And while the notion of ‘value’ itself is constantly in flux and the theory of value creation needs an update, as Roger Martin and Mikkel Krenchel point out, activities like note taking, one of many others in the designers’ toolset, help challenge our definition of value and allow us to own our value on our terms.
Designers, myself included, have been going around saying that research does not get the visibility and respect it deserves. While we are right, we mistake talking for action, even when experience tells us that telling isn’t as effective as showing. Explanation and persuasion are useful insofar as they are grounded in action. Picture an extraverted startup culture where designers assertively push user research. At best, this earns us culture brownie points, even if it doesn't achieve much. At worst, pushing research inordinately and without diplomacy is Sisyphean and exhausting, not only for the designers doing the pushing but also for the morale of the research culture. Furthermore, too much telling may even backfire if not done in the spirit of advocacy, a theme I will explore in future writing. Showing on the other hand requires tact and gets shit done without fanfare.
Opportunities to own the value of research are many and hidden in plain sight. It takes insight to recognise and make the most of them. In my experience, stakeholders (like the PM in the earlier example who asked about research more than once) certainly aren’t anti-research. Even in lower research maturity cultures, they are curious about it and want to engage with it. When and how that happens is in the designer's control.
Earlier, I warned designers to be cautious while navigating cultures that value conformity. I wasn’t suggesting that they give up note taking. Many a time, design activities outside the scope of ‘UI/UX’, and especially research activities, are about sailing against the tide; they challenge the status quo. When the current is more forgiving, we can move forward by doing little. And at times, the current is less forgiving. The point is to keep moving; the boat was made to sail. Note taking, for oneself or others, is all about moving and challenging the status quo. Quietly. Conducting research and note taking isn't a waste of time. It is the opposite. And I’ve always been glad for doing it.