Notetaker guidelines
During research sessions, it's important to have a designated primary notetaker. While others may observe and take notes, the primary notetaker should read these guidelines to understand their role and responsibilities.
Preparing to take notes
Notes can be taken in any app you'd like - Excel, Word, a .md file, Handrail, or any other way that works for you. Regardless of how you take notes, be sure to capture the following in the notes:
Participant#
date
time
test name
Your notes should be stored in your project research folder on GitHub. Refer to this guide to help you prepare for your notetaker, whether it’s someone from your team or Perigean.
An example of verbatim notes can be found here.
How to take good notes
Primary notetakers take verbatim notes, which is literally transcribing what the participant and moderator said and did.
Do not input your observations/feelings/solutions in the notes.
It doesn't have to be a live, full transcript, but it should be as close to exact as possible. After taking notes, fill in areas not captured exactly during the session.
The notetaker should be taking notes only. Avoid interpretation and save that for debriefs and session reports.
Something that seems unimportant could surface as a pattern after a couple of interviews. So, capture everything in the raw notes.
To help the moderator identify where personally identifiable information (PII) is spoken or displayed on the screen and later remove it from the recording, please stamp "PII" in each spot where it occurs in the transcript.
“Type really fast and be kind to yourself.” - Sophia. Don't correct yourself while typing, don't worry about typos. You can go back and fix this later, but try to be as accurate as possible. Timestamp areas you get lost and go back to the recording to fill in those details
Keep all communications within the #feedback-backchannel thread for the session.
The notetaker and moderator should be partners in this session
The notetaker should compile questions from the channel for the moderator
After the session
If you saved transcripts from the session, you can reference them at this point to fill in any gaps you may have missed. It's not recommended to rely solely on these transcripts because the software may have words or context wrong. Instead, it's recommended to supplement your notes with the transcription.
You must scrub all notes of all PII before uploading them to Github. PII is all content that could be used to identify the participant. Name, age, date of birth, location or specific VA facility (unless that is critical to the study), diagnoses, etc.
Once your notes are cleaned and scrubbed on PII, you can add them to GitHub. The moderator can send you a link to a .md file for you to upload your notes.
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.