Practical note-taking techniques every UX Researcher should know

How to take better notes that accelerate the time to research insights

You've worked hard to schedule research sessions, and the big week has arrived. Facing back-to-back, hour-long sessions across several days, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data. What's important? What isn't? What constitutes a meaningful theme? And how will you organize everything into a coherent, insightful report by next week?

Poorly taken notes—or even excessively detailed ones—can leave you struggling to craft a compelling report for your stakeholders. What you need are effective, efficient note-taking strategies. Entering research sessions with a clear approach to collecting and organizing information helps you quickly identify emerging findings and themes, accelerates your synthesis process, and keeps stakeholders informed and engaged throughout.

This article covers essential note-taking tips and tricks for UX Researchers, whether you're new to the field or a seasoned professional refining your methods. It combines time-tested best practices with contemporary approaches based on practical experience.

Choosing the right tool for note-taking

Let's take a look at the most common tools used for note-taking during research sessions, and why the humble spreadsheet is our preferred option.

First, the original: pen and paper—it can work in a pinch and is still the go-to when you're taking your own notes during a session. It's helpful as a prop that demonstrates to participants that you're engaged in active listening. However, it requires a lot of manual transposition of handwritten notes into a format that can later be manipulated during analysis.

Workshop and facilitation tools like Miro or Figma are another option we avoid, although they're often popular with designers and other UX professionals. The main reason being: notes are seldom the final deliverable, and further synthesis and manipulation of the data will need to take place somewhere. Spreadsheets naturally facilitate this, and the outputs of synthesis can later be translated back into Miro if desired.

Finally, we generally prefer not to use note-taking tools completely integrated into your UX Research SaaS platform for the simple reason that these have low transportability over time. Unfortunately, valuable insights will get lost as SaaS companies get acquired, sunset features, raise their prices (prompting your organization to switch), or do any number of things that mean you lose access to the data. Even when these notes can be exported, you lose the richness which was the selling point for maintaining them inside the platform in the first place (such as labels or direct connections with video clips). Better to use a spreadsheet which can then be integrated into any repository tool that you use.

So how does one actually take notes in Excel? One tried and true approach is the rainbow spreadsheet method, popularized by the late Tomer Sharon: list your discussion guide questions down rows, and assign each participant a column. Within each cell, record data such as observed behaviors or relevant quotes. While the classical rainbow method uses colors as data, we prefer numbers or simple binary indicators (1/0) which can be used in calculations. This creates a matrix that allows you to quickly spot patterns horizontally (by question) and vertically (by participant).

Sample data from a hypothetical usability test to illustrate the rainbow spreadsheet method

Let the discussion guide drive the order for note-taking

Some have pointed out a distinction between chronological and topical note-taking—organizing notes by when they occur during the session, or by high-level topic and its relevance to research questions. Both approaches have merit, but neither is ideal.

Instead, start with a logically-flowing discussion guide that’s at least semi-structured around the types of questions you're going to ask and in what order. This makes it easier to organize your notes, while making the session more logically coherent for the participant.

Sample excerpt from a discussion guide for a hypothetical usability test

Though rainbow spreadsheets are a natural fit for this, you’ll have to start with a strong discussion guide. That’s the topic of another article, but one classic and effective way to go about this: starting with the research questions and using a grid to make sure that your discussion guide is addressing each of the high-level research questions from multiple angles.

Selecting the appropriate tool forms the foundation of effective note-taking—but equally important is determining who will use them during research sessions

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Ideal setup: facilitator with dedicated note-taker

Wherever possible, the ideal is to have a dedicated note-taker supporting a facilitator in real time.

Aside from serving many practical advantages (like offering technical support as needed), dedicated note-takers create an inherent efficiency by making sure notes are documented as soon as the session is over. This facilitates speed to insight and analysis time because otherwise, a solo researcher will need to take minimalistic notes during the session and then go back and watch the recorded session (effectively doubling analysis time).

Further, a dedicated note-taker is a second set of eyes with different perspectives, interpretations, and expectations, which helps to reduce bias and increase the reliability and validity of findings. If two independent individuals reach similar conclusions, it's more likely to be an accurate representation of reality than if one person comes to the conclusion by themselves. Confusing moments that might leave a solo researcher stuck re-watching a video later on instead get captured in the moment by a note-taker.

Of course, this isn't always practical or possible for every team or for every research project. If you’re a solo researcher or freelancer coming from the outside, this could be a great opportunity to take a first dip of the toe into the “pool” of democratization. First, identify an engaged stakeholder or colleague, such as a designer or product manager. Give them a high-level briefing on what the note-taker duty requires (perhaps by sending them this article), and—with some training—they can do this for you. This is a very low-stakes and high-reward way to further scale the research resources on your team. On the other hand, if you’re already on a team with multiple research resources, work it into your process that each project will have a dedicated note-taker.

While having a dedicated note-taker creates the ideal setup for capturing comprehensive research data, the question remains: exactly what, and how much, should be documented during a session?

Goldilocks note-taking: neither too thorough nor too sparse

Your goal as a note-taker is not to thoroughly document every single behavior or verbalization observed or heard during the session. That’s what a recording is for.

Consequently, a best practice is to always get the participant's consent to make a recording for internal purposes that will not be shared publicly. This way, you can refer back to it for anything that might have been missed. Even for in-person sessions, a proper set-up can broadcast to a virtual meeting for remote observers and recording services.

Regardless, when starting out as a note-taker, err on the side of documenting more rather than less. You'll gradually get a feel for what’s important over time. One key lens for this is going back to the research questions and thinking about the ultimate output of these insights—i.e., the report or deliverable that will be used by stakeholders to make decisions.

Some of the most common categories of data recorded in notes include: quotes, behaviors, keywords, patterns, concerns, frustrations, surprises, positive moments, gaps in knowledge, missing information, body language, emotional tone, or reactions.

If circumstances require you to take cursory notes (e.g., a solo researcher without a note-taker), marginalia or labeling may be helpful. Developing some sort of system where a color highlight or symbol in the margins has a specific meaning can act as a shorthand, making quickly jotted ideas more thorough. For instance: “!” or yellow highlighting could indicate a “Wow” moment, “☹” or red highlighting could indicate a frustration, “Q” or green highlighting could indicate a great participant quote.

Bear in mind also that note-takers can and should paraphrase verbatim quotes. No report needs to include the "ums" and "uhs" and other verbal pauses that naturally arise as people articulate their thoughts.

Finding the right balance in manual note-taking is essential, but technology offers additional layers of support that can complement your note-taking strategy.

Record and transcribe, but don't rely on AI note-takers

Most modern video conferencing tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, and WebEx now offer AI-powered transcription and summarization tools, which further help to document everything that is stated. The key benefit is that these generate searchable, timestamped transcripts, freeing note-takers to focus on meaningful highlights or key words instead of transcribing quotes by hand.

Another advantage of AI transcription and note-taking tools is the ability to tag and highlight moments in the session in real-time as they happen. For instance, Fathom¹ has a bookmark feature that a facilitator may use during a session to note a key quote that should be used as a highlight reel clip in the final deliverable.

Real-time bookmarking and highlight clip generation within Fathom note-taker

Clips from recordings are a powerful way to add ethos, or emotional engagement, to your final deliverables. These may be anonymized with post-processing tools, and if it doesn't make sense to make a video, you can use tools like Descript to pull out just the audio and create an engaging shareable.

Nevertheless, the AI-generated summary these tools provide should not be considered an alternative to enlisting a dedicated note-taker, since these tools work by collapsing or mechanically shortening a larger text rather than organizing the information and synthesizing it according to a structure like the spreadsheet that we've been discussing. We expect these tools to get better over time, but perhaps a more durable limitation will be their ability to note behaviors and other non-verbal cues.

While recordings and transcripts provide a comprehensive record of what happened during research sessions, they don't inherently reveal what matters most to your project. Rather, this must emerge from active interpretation of findings.

Front-load UX research synthesis as you go

You’ll need to synthesize notes into insights for stakeholders—and getting a jump-start on the process can be augmented with two strategies.

The first is summarizing the high-level themes right after each session, which can be done individually—quickly jotting down what stood out as the most important insights or revelations relevant to the research questions directly after the session—or collaboratively, in a huddle between the facilitator and dedicated note-taker.

Example from the “Summary” tab of the sample note-taking spreadsheet

The second (which may be combined with the first), is a debrief, which occurs with stakeholders, clients, and/or other non-researchers, either after each session or on a daily/weekly basis. This helps process observations and findings with the team that will be using the information as quickly as possible, keeping it fresh. When you learn what was surprising or interesting to a stakeholder, it may be completely different from what was interesting or surprising to you. This valuable signal gives you an idea of what to listen for and what to focus on in whatever sessions you have left.

Both these ideas will front-load synthesis and help you to expedite the final deliverable writing since you’ll know the key answers to your research questions as they happen.

The bottom line

Effective note-taking is about capturing what matters, in a format that accelerates insight discovery. With a structured approach—whether choosing the right tools to front-loading your synthesis—you'll transform the often overwhelming process of mixed-methods research into a streamlined workflow that delivers value faster.

Your team’s system should evolve with your needs. Experiment with different aspects of these techniques, assess what works in your specific context, and refine over time. Whether you're working solo or on a larger team, the ultimate goal remains consistent: less time managing notes and more time generating the insights behind meaningful design decisions.

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