Overview
Tags are powerful tools for quantifying your qualitative data. The Qualitative Insights tool uses tags to help organize and filter your observations when you analyze your data later on. The more accurate and refined your tags are, the more meaningful your results will be.
Setting up tags before sessions
If you're certain about the keywords and phrases that your study will focus on or surface, you can create tags prior to your first session.
For more structured, task-based research, we recommend setting up your tags in advance. For more open-ended research, you may prefer to hold off on creating any tags until you see patterns start to emerge during your sessions.
Tag your observations as you go
You and your team can add tags to observations during or after your sessions. We generally recommend tagging your observations afterwards to help you focus your attention on what matters most in your session (your participant!).
As you start creating and tagging observations, new tags will show up in the tag management area, giving you a complete picture of all the tags used by you and your team.
Any tags you create will be accessible as you take notes during and after your session too.
Tags for task-based research
For task-based research (such as usability testing), you can predict some of the tags you’ll find most useful for your study based on your objectives.
A group of tags that relate to sentiment is a safe bet. Using tags to identify the tasks or screens you’re testing, or the activities you’re asking your participants to complete, is also a good idea.
Tags for open-ended research
In the case of more open-ended research (such as user interviews), predefining tags beforehand can be difficult and may lead to unintentional bias.
While you may add some relevant tags before you begin, refrain from settling on your tagging structure until you’ve collected all of your data. Taking some time to immerse yourself in what you’ve heard will help develop a set of tags best suited to the data you’ve collected.
Tag groups
Tag groups make it easy to combine related tags, making it simple to locate them when you come to add them to observations.
Tag colors
When creating tag groups you have some options around how tags will be colored when added to that group:
Set a default tag group color, so when any tags are created in that group they will have the group color applied. This makes it easy to identify tags that relate to specific groups when you come to perform your analysis.
As above, except tags added to the group from other groups will be recolored with your newly set group color. You can also change the color of existing tags in the group too, or leave them unchanged.
Tags in the group can be colored independently. This can be useful when the tag colors themselves convey some information. For example, if the group relates to user sentiment you may choose to color the tags in ways that suggest the tone of the sentiment expressed.
Tag description
You can add a description to a tag or tag group. This is fairly common when you collaborate with others - it's good for your team members to have context when looking at your tags, and vice versa.
Merge tags
You can also merge tags together. This can be particularly handy after a session with multiple note takers as one person's 'user_interface' might be another person's 'UI'.
Regionalized differences in spelling can also be cleaned up this way. 'Color' versus 'colour', anyone?