Until recently, I captured all my data from interviews, contextual inquiries, walkthroughs, and user testing in Word. For each participant, I’d type my observations etc. into a copy of the test plan. At the end I was left with many many documents which I would print out, spread across my desk, and stare at.

I became dissatisfied with this form of analysis. It resists rigor. So during the second to last round of testing I did, I put all my Word notes into an Excel document to make comparisons more effectively. It was lovely. It took a lot of effort with all that copying & pasting, but it was worth it.

I’ll admit, the prospect of actually taking notes in Excel terrified me. But when my last testing engagement came around I found some courage and did it. And it wasn’t horrible! It didn’t flow like Word, but with time I can see how it could begin to.

I found that the key to lack of horribleness was re-using the analysis template I created the first time around. If you’re interested, you can download my data analysis template here.

It should be fairly self explanatory once you open it up, but I will say a few things. First, the performance columns and task performance matrix reference how we measure task performance… on HFI’s 0-2 scale. Second, questions labeled P1, etc. are probing questions. Lastly, you’ll paste everything into the All Data sheet when you’re done. This helps you analyze sessions as a whole rather than just individual tasks.

Enjoy!

Tags: Data Analysis, templates