Hey there, I'm Michael. You may remember me from an earlier course where you learned about some of the basics of UX design. In this video, I'll be helping out your instructor Jason, by guiding you through some tips on spreadsheet note-taking during usability studies. The notes you take will help you understand the user's point of view and experience. What is spreadsheet note-taking and how can it keep your notes organized during a usability study? Let's investigate. Spreadsheet note-taking is a simple and easy method to keep your notes organized using a spreadsheet. You can use a spreadsheet to take notes about the entire usability study in one place. Without a spreadsheet, your notes can be disorganized. Another thing that happens without a spreadsheet is it can be hard to remember a specific details. Finally, there's not always time to go back and review recordings, you can start by setting up the structure of your spreadsheet. This step involves adding in the categories for different observations you're making. This step is important because this document will help you organize the behavior, thoughts, and opinions of the participants that you'll observe during the usability study. Now, there are five categories you'll be using in the note-taking spreadsheet: Task, click path, observations, quotes, and task completion. The first column is for tasks. Here you can list the participant's name and each of the prompts that the participant will be guided to complete during the study. Be sure to fill this information in before the study begins. Before the study, you'll also need to create a note-taking spreadsheet for each participant. After filling in column A, make a few duplicate tabs and start filling those in too. The second column is for the click path. As a reminder, the click path is the route the participants take to complete a task during the study. Recording information about a user's click path can help develop new insights about the user flow. Pay special attention to where the first few clicks are because this will give you a better understanding of how intuitive the products navigation is. Now we're ready to take some notes. Let's start participant B's recording from the usability study for the dog walker app, starting at task 1. To pick a dog walker, I don't really know if dog walkers near you is how to schedule or if this schedule rectangle thing is the way to go, I'm a bit confused. I'll try to schedule thing. Cool. It seems like that worked because the app went to the next screen. I'm going to assume if this was clickable, I'd see a calendar at this point or it looks like maybe these two rectangles are both boxes that I would type a date and time into. Interesting. One thing I'm thinking about for myself and my own dogs is that it doesn't seem like there's a way to schedule a reoccurring dog walker. Like if I want someone to come walk the dog every week at the same time, the scheduling page seems like it's only a onetime appointment for this one date and one time. Anyway, I'll go ahead and click the Submit thing, which I think is a button. Based on the recording, we can understand the following click path for our user, home, schedule and submit. In the third column comes the observations. Here you can note down behaviors, opinions, and attitudes, along with any errors, issues, or areas of confusion. Let's continue with participant B's recording from the same usability study as they complete task 1 and make observations. I mean, it was a bit hard to figure out which button to press on the home screen, but that's okay. That could be fixed, but I still figured it out. Based on the recording, we observe that they seem to have two main issues. First, there were confused about what's to press on the home screen, and second, they wondered if there was a way to schedule a reoccurring dog walker. Again, this is great user feedback that can help generate fresh insights about the direction of the design for the dog walking app. The observation column is about providing an indirect understanding of the behaviors and opinions of potential users. We can also understand the participants tone of voice or attitude while completing the tasks in the prompt. For a direct understanding of the participants' experiences, the fourth column, quotes should be used. This column contains any significant quotes, both positive and negative. Now let's listen to their response about their experience of completing task 1 in the study. I think there needs to be a way to deal with reoccurring booking. Almost everyone I know with a dog, does it schedule individual appointments like this. Let's pause here. Participant B just completed task 1, 2, pick a date and time to schedule a dog walker and is answering the follow-up question. They said, I think there needs to be a way to do a reoccurring booking. Almost everyone I know with a dog doesn't schedule individual appointments like this. These words confirm our earlier observations that the participant is interested in a reoccurring booking feature. For the final category in column E, let's take note on task completion, which focuses on how easily the task was to complete. We assign the number 1 for easy to complete, two for completed, but with difficulty, and three, for not completed. I mean, it was a bit hard to figure out which button to press on the home screen, but that's okay. That could be fixed, but I still figured it out. What did you observe? Participant B said, "I mean, it was a bit hard to figure out which button to press on the home screen, but that's okay. That could be fixed, but I still figured it out." For this task, we assign the value of two because the participant completed the task, but with some difficulty, that's it for task 1. Now just repeat the same process for each task. Keep in mind, there's lots of information you can include in your spreadsheet but sometimes participants share ideas or feedback after the study. In these cases, you can use the additional notes section at the bottom of the spreadsheet. After the study is completed and you've added all of your notes to the spreadsheet, it will be easy to identify the most common participant behavior and the task participants found easy or difficult. There you have it. You know how to use spreadsheet note-taking during a usability study. Hopefully you're getting a feel for how to take notes in a spreadsheet. Now it's your turn to practice the skill during your next activity. Good luck.
