A big part of Human-Computer Interaction research is observation, staring for hours on at how your participants use and abuse your system, or behave without it. Having detailed information on exactly when and what people do, is quite important. The more detailed the logs, the better.

A usual approach is recording the audio during an evaluation session. Or even better, pointing a bunch of cameras to the participants from as many angles as possible. But sometimes, just sometimes, privacy and ethics (or just unwilling participants) get in the way. The next best thing? Taking notes…

Strangely enough I couldn’t find a single, simple app that would just let me write notes with timestamps next to it (I’m guessing my Googling skills aren’t what they used to be, but still, I needed a solution quickly!).

Say hello to Atom, the “hackable” editor from the people at GitHub. I quickly threw some JavasScript together et voila, a solution to my problems: the time-notes package.

I know, this is the complete opposite of rocket science. But sometimes simple (it’s just a few lines of code) is enough. You’d be surprised how useful this was when spending 7 hours taking notes in a highly sensitive (personal data discussions with the occasional emotional moment) evaluation. Hey, it even saves it into the tsv format!

Now if someone could automate the process of analysing my notes, that’d be great.

Atom editor: https://atom.io/
Time-notes package: https://atom.io/packages/time-notes