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When it comes to taking notes, everyone seems to work out their own favorite method over time. Some take longhand notes in a journal, some prefer to red-pen hard-copy output, and so on. Below, we describe some methods that have worked well for us in past studies. Feel free to mix and adapt them as you see fitneeded.

What makes an effective "finding"?

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However, because the findings are scattered across disparate tasks, it’s harder to pull together the big picture – patterns that recur across tasks or across several trees. So, we recommend that you:

• Do Doing a first pass on a given tree, examining each task separately.
  
  
• Do Doing a second pass on that tree to look for insights across tasks, and record these on a separate sheet.
  
  
• If you’re we’re testing several trees, do doing a third pass to look for similarities and differences across all the trees.
  
  
  

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Another way to recording findings is to list the tasks down a column of a spreadsheet, then list your our findings beside each task. (The example below also uses color coding to indicate the task's success rate.)

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Note that we’ve used a spreadsheet here, but we’ve also done this matrix using a whiteboard, adding each finding as a color-coded sticky note (where green is good, pink is bad, and yellow is neutral).

You We may find the whiteboard method better for on-site collaboration with your our team, whereas the spreadsheet may work better for remote collaboration (assuming you’re we’re using an online spreadsheet like Google Sheets or Office 365) or for cases where the results need to be portable and easily accessed later in the project.

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This works well when the findings map directly to specific items in our trees. For findings that need action (see below), you we may want to highlight these according (e.g. red cell background).

The benefit of this method is context – when you we come back to revise this tree (or extract the best ideas from it for a new tree), you’ll we’ll see the specific items that performed well or poorly.

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Finally, for more general findings, you we may want to create an area at the bottom of the spreadsheet to document these:

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