Welcome to consider.ly! 🎉

Structure of this quick guide:

1. Creating your first project
2. Creating your first note
3. Creating your taxonomy of tags – or creating tags on the fly
4. Creating your first insight
5. Adding team members

Whether you’re a UX research novice or expert, a single researcher, or work in a distributed team, follow a research framework like atomic research or have your own approach, consider.ly’s simple and flexible design lets you organize your research and present your findings easily and adjusted to your needs.

In the following, we will show you the fastest way to start using consider.ly and how to use the key features.

No more than the fundamentals are covered – for a guided deep dive we recommend scheduling a personal demo with Jonas. Also, we invite you to start a free 30-day trial and try out the features yourself.

This article will teach you:

• the core concepts of consider.ly,
• where to put and how to organize your raw data,
• how to give your raw data structure and work through it,
• and how to store your research findings and link them back to raw data.

Note: This article serves as a quick guide for the whole tool and therefore briefly summarizes a few other help center articles.

Core concepts – organizing your research in consider.ly

Naturally, during your research you accumulate lots of data that you’d like to work through, organize, and share – consider.ly supports you during the whole UX research process. These are the core concepts of consider.ly:

• Teams are your shared workspace within your organization.
• Projects cover a set of data, for example, for one user research study, like a set of interviews.
• Notes are the way to import and store your raw data. They can contain text, images, videos, and other file attachments.
• Tags are applied to parts of your data, for example, a relevant user quote, to spot themes later on. You are free to define your own taxonomy of tags.
• Insights are where your research findings are stored. You can link parts of your data to specific insights to verify your hypotheses and thereby always trace back your conclusions to the raw facts.

1. Creating your first project

After you log in to your account, you see the project dashboard on which your projects are shown.

1. To create a new project click the blue Create new project button in the top left corner.
2. The project page will open.
3. Click on the project name (“Untitled project”) and enter a descriptive name.

💡 Best give your project a meaningful name so that you’ll find it later on (in the dashboard, searches, etc.).

Meaningful names, such as “John’s interview study for product X”, are important so that you and your team can properly work with the project. This is especially useful later on to mentally match search results or insights to the respective projects.

↳  Learn more about our sample project, archiving projects, project templates, and project plugins in our respective articles.

2. Creating your first note

Enter your project and navigate to the project’s “Notes” page. There you can store and group your research data in notes. In a fresh project, there already is a first untitled notes group. Rename and create groups to organize your notes to your needs.

Creating a new notes group

1. Click on the + button on the right side of the notes groups.
2. Click on the group’s name.
3. Edit the group’s name.
4. Hit ENTER or click outside the input field to rename the group.

Creating a note

1. Choose the group you want to add your note to.
2. Click on the + button on the bottom of the respective group. An input field appears where you can enter your note’s name.
3. Enter your note’s name.
   💡 We ourselves often use one note for one study participant. So the note’s name might be the name of the participant and maybe the date of data collection (such as “2019-07-24 Steve”).
4. Hit ENTER to create the note.

↳  For formatting text and adding hyperlinks see the respective article.

3. Creating your taxonomy of tags – or creating tags on the fly

Tagging the spoken or written word of your participants is an important step to structure your data for later analysis and spotting themes. Whether you have a taxonomy of tags in mind or want to explore your data and create tags on the fly, consider.ly supports your workflow.

Creating new tags

If you have a taxonomy of tags in mind, you can create it within the board on a project’s “Tags” page. 

1. Click on the + button on the bottom of the respective tag group.
2. Enter a tag name.
3. Hover over the tag. A three-dot-menu for the tag appears.
4. Click on the three-dot-menu to open the tag’s menu.
5. Choose a color for your tag. This color is used to highlight the respective text passages.

Creating new tags on the fly

Tags are organized on a board (just as notes). By adding new tags directly from within a note, the new tag is automatically added to your first tag group and you can organize them later on.

1. To apply a tag to a text passage within a note, select the text passage. The tag selector will appear on the right side of your note.
2. Enter your desired tag name in the tag selector’s input field.
3. Click on Create tag or hit ENTER to create the new tag.

↳  Read more about organizing your tags, the workflow of coding your data, and searching for overlapping tags in our respective articles.

4. Creating your first insight

You can either create a new insight from the “Insights” section in your project or create new insights on the fly as you work through your notes.

An “insight” is – just as a note – a document that you can fill and structure to your needs. One special element within this document is a reference (basically a backlink) to a selected part of a note (so that you can link to your raw data and trace your conclusions to the raw facts).

When working through a note, you might spot an important part in your data that sparks an idea or contributes to a hypothesis. To preserve that, you can link highlights to insights:

When setting tags in your notes, the set tag will be shown on the right side of the note.

1. Click on the tag of the respective passage that you want to link to an insight. A dropdown menu appears.
2. Click on Attach to insight. An overview of all your insights across all projects appears.
3. Click on the desired insight or create a new insight (within a project of your choice). The selected text will be put at the bottom of your insight as a special “reference” element.

↳  Learn more about creating, publishing, and presenting insights in our respective articles.

5. Adding team members

To share your work with your colleagues or collaborate on a research project, you can invite members to your team on consider.ly.

1. Go to the team dashboard.
2. Click on the “Members” tab.
3. Enter your colleague’s email address.
4. Select the role you want to assign to your colleague.
5. Click on Invite. Your colleague will now receive an email with a link to sign-up and directly join your team. Her/his account will then be assigned directly to your team.

↳  You can learn more about inviting your team members or changing the role of a team member in our respective articles.

Now it’s your turn

Having worked through this guide, you’re ready to efficiently run your research in consider.ly.

Now, we’d love to hear about your individual needs and use case! Feel free to always contact us with any kind of feedback – chat with us, email us, call us, come by and get a coffee. We’re constantly improving our tool based on customer feedback to help you level up your research.

We truly appreciate the time you’re spending trying out consider.ly. If you haven’t already, start your free 30-day trial today.

Thanks, you’re great!