UX Research & Design development studio
One of the main tasks of UX researchers in their everyday work is conducting numerous interviews with users of different kinds of products, websites, applications, etc. Researchers may record such interviews, so that they can carefully analyse the data and identify possible areas for improvement. It is more and more common to use transcripts of audio content of those meetings with users. There are several advantages of using transcripts in UX research.
When conducting a meeting, the researcher wants to take out as much as they can from talking to each user. Sadly, they can only jot down a few key pieces of information in a few points, otherwise they might become too distracted by trying to intake as much as they can. On the other hand, they might focus too much on the conversation and forget to note what was the most important. In the end, they might have to watch the whole interview all over again. A transcript allows researchers to quickly scan users' words, which can help in the analysis phase.
With transcripts, UX researchers can see exactly what words or phrases users used during interviews. If you are a UX researcher having to conduct some interviews, it even might be a good idea to prepare a list of key words or phrases before the meetings and compare them with what will be said by different participants. If you aim to make your users feel “inspired”, for instance, words like “it looks very creative” or “I’m amazed by the design” might be what you’re looking to hear from them. Actually, one of the features of our Live platform is sentiment analysis, which can help indicate if our interviewee is feeling happy, sad, angry, etc. when answering given questions.
At the end of every project, UX researchers must report their findings and justify recommendations that they offer to their clients. Transcription allows UX researchers to use real quotes of their interviewees when preparing reports. By making suggestions backed up by users' own words, researchers increase their level of reliability. There is plenty of other benefits of using transcripts like better understanding of users by stakeholders.
Those are only some of the few positive aspects of using transcripts in UX research and there are many more.
At UX Mining, we combine technology with UX processes. Our tool Transcribe is an online program for transcription based on artificial intelligence. AI can drastically speed up the process of transcription. Previously, one had to do it manually, sometimes wasting long hours on writing down content of video materials. Our tool provides automatic video transcription. With Transcribe, you can quickly prepare transcripts of your videos in even 140 languages. Not only that, but there is also a possibility to turn that transcript into subtitles that can be added to videos on platforms such as YouTube. The program has several additional features allowing you to:
When conducting interviews, UX researchers have to fully understand users’ needs and struggles, so they often focus on the actual conversation and users’ words rather than taking notes. The program allows for quick annotation of any information that seems relevant in the form of highlights.
Our tool makes it possible to create tags in order to categorise and better organise our highlights. If we are interested in testing a specific feature or seeing where our users are struggling, we can create tags before the interviews, which makes assigning highlights even easier.
Our search tool makes finding keywords incredibly easy, which speeds up the analysis process. That way if you’re looking for user’s answers regarding particular issue or you want to quote them but don’t remember what that person said exactly, simply type in relevant words and click “Search”.
Assigning speakers’ names to our transcript is a very simple, yet powerful feature. The Transcribe mode gives us the option to name our speakers. In case we do not want to assign names, we can skip that step. Even in a situation where anonymity of interviewees is required, dividing the text into lines and naming speakers “Interviewer”, “Participant”, etc., can help us avoid getting lost in a long dialogue.
You recorded the session, generated a transcript, wrote down highlights and tagged them. What to do with all this data? Don’t worry! We have an option to quickly generate an Excel spreadsheet that we call “The Rainbow Sheet” containing all the information needed for deeper analysis. You can find there your hypotheses and clearly see if they have been confirmed in each case or not (if yes, the cell is filled out with color), your highlights, tags, etc. As a result, you don’t have to waste time on putting all of that information together and can focus on other, more urgent matters.
