Most interviews are heard once, summarised in a deck and forgotten. Fieldnotes keeps every conversation tagged and searchable, so the pattern you spot in September can still find the quote from March.
MA
By Maren AshdownFounder, and a researcher for eleven years
Your first 20 interviews are free. No card needed.
Study 03 · Month-end close
P07 keeps a second spreadsheet.ask P02 and P05 about theirs
04:19 · Dana R. Honestly, that spreadsheet is the real system. The official dashboard is what I show my manager.
Pattern forming3 studies
The spreadsheet is the real system
Raised by 9 of 14 participants since March
An example pattern in Fieldnotes: the spreadsheet is the real system, raised by 9 of 14 participants across 3 studies.
4,200 researchers keep their interviews in Fieldnotes, at teams including
The letter02
On listening twice.
Why the most useful thing a research team can own is its own past, and what we built to keep it.
MA
Maren Ashdown, founderWritten in Bristol, October 2026
Eleven years ago I ran my first usability study: six participants, a borrowed meeting room and a notebook I still own1. By the end of the week I knew exactly why people were abandoning our checkout. By the end of the quarter nobody remembered, including me. The findings lived in a slide deck that was presented once and opened, according to its history, twice more.
1Spiral bound, eighty pages, coffee on page 31. It still holds more findings than that team’s shared drive ever did.
That pattern followed me to every team I joined. We were good at hearing people and bad at keeping what they said. Each study started from zero, and the same frustrations surfaced interview after interview, recorded faithfully and filed where nobody would look.
The problem was never a shortage of research. Most teams I’ve worked with had hundreds of hours of interviews2. The problem is that a transcript is a terrible place to keep an insight. It is long, it is linear, and it only answers the question you were asking on the day you recorded it.
2In our beta, the median team held 412 hours of recorded interviews. Fewer than one session in sixteen was opened again after its first readout.
A transcript is a terrible place to keep an insight.
§What a repository should do
So we built Fieldnotes around one idea: the unit of research is not the study, it is the moment. A sentence where someone describes a workaround. The pause before they admit they gave up. Fieldnotes lets you tag that moment in a couple of keystrokes and keeps it attached to the person, the date and their exact words.
Once moments are tagged, they start to find each other. A pain point from a March onboarding study sits beside one from a September pricing study, and you can see they are the same problem described in two vocabularies. We call those patterns3, and they are what you bring to the room instead of a deck.
3Patterns are suggestions, never verdicts. Fieldnotes proposes them from your tags, and a researcher confirms each one before anyone else sees it.
None of this replaces the researcher. Software can’t decide what matters, and I’d distrust any that claimed to. What it can do is make sure that when you know something, your whole team can find out why you know it, with the participant’s own words one click away4.
4Every quote links to its second in the recording, so a stakeholder can hear the hesitation for themselves.
Below is the part I’m proudest of. It’s an excerpt from one of our own interviews, shared with permission. Pick a sentence that matters to you and tag it. That small act, repeated across a few hundred conversations, is how a team starts to remember.
Interview seven from our own month-end close study. Select any sentence, or click one, then choose a tag. Watch what the board does with it.
Keyboard:Tab into the transcript, ↑↓ to move, Enter to open tags, or press 123.
Tagged as pain point.Tagged as workaround.Tagged as quote.
Interview 07 · Month-end close
14 March 2026 · 41 min · Dana R., finance operations
03:58Interviewer
Walk me through the last time you closed the month.
04:06Dana
So the first thing I do is export everything from the billing system.Then I paste it into my own spreadsheet, the one nobody else knows about.Honestly, that spreadsheet is the real system.The official dashboard is what I show my manager.
04:31Interviewer
Why not run the close from the dashboard?
04:35Dana
Because I don’t trust it after the fifth of the month.Numbers move and nobody tells me why.So I screenshot it on the first, just so I have something to point at.
05:02Interviewer
And when the numbers don’t match?
05:06Dana
I message three people and wait.Usually it’s a refund someone processed by hand.It takes about a day, every month, and I’ve stopped mentioning it because it sounds like complaining.
Tag as
Pain 0Workaround 0Quote 0
confirm with P02 before Thursday
Insights board
Month-end close · 7 interviews
Pain points 0Workarounds 0Quotes 0
Nothing on the board yet. Tag a sentence and it lands here, with who said it and when.
Patterns
across this study
When a moment you tag matches ones from earlier interviews, a pattern appears here.
Four chapters06
The tool, in four chapters.
Capture, tag, find, share. Each is small on its own. Together they are how a team remembers what it heard.
IChapter one · Capture
Bring every conversation into one room.
Drop in recordings from any meeting tool, or connect a folder and let new sessions arrive on their own. Fieldnotes transcribes in 31 languages, labels speakers and keeps every word pinned to its second in the recording.
Audio or video up to four hours long
Speaker labels you can correct in place
Names and numbers redacted before anyone else reads them
Recordings Week 11 · nine sessions
Month-end close
9 sessions
DRInterview 07 · Dana R.41:12 · 2 names redactedReady
MOInterview 08 · Malik O.
82%
ITInterview 09 · Ines T.52:03 · uploaded 4 min agoQueued
Fig. 1Sessions arrive transcribed and redacted. Interview eight is still being transcribed.
IIChapter two · Tag
Mark the moment, not the meeting.
Select a sentence and press a number. Tags come from a taxonomy your team agrees on, so a pain point means the same thing to everyone who reads it. Most researchers tag an hour of interview in under fifteen minutes.
Number keys for your five most used tags
One shared taxonomy, with a definition for every tag
Every tag keeps the speaker, the date and the second
pain
workaround
quote
Team taxonomy
Shared
Pain point1214
Workaround2131
Quote396
Feature request458
Delight537
Fig. 2A team taxonomy. Each tag carries a shortcut and a running count.
IIIChapter three · Find
Let a March study meet a September one.
Search every interview your team has run, by tag, by phrase or by who was speaking. When moments from different studies describe the same thing, Fieldnotes suggests a pattern. A researcher confirms it before anyone else sees it.
Search across studies, tags and speakers
Suggested patterns, always confirmed by a person
See when a pattern first appeared and how it grew
P02 · Mar
P05 · May
P11 · Jul
P07 · Sep
PatternConfirmed by Maren A.
Data is re-keyed between tools
9 participants · 3 studies · March to September
JKDRLFSNBWand 4 more
Fig. 3One pattern across three studies, nine participants and seven months.
IVChapter four · Share
Hand over evidence, not opinions.
Publish a pattern as a short page your stakeholders can read in two minutes. Every claim sits beside the quotes behind it, and every quote plays from its own second in the recording. Readers are free, so everyone who should listen can.
Insight pages that show the quotes behind each claim
Clips that play from the exact second
Unlimited free readers, with comments
Readout · Q3
Fieldnotes No. 14
Insight · published · 12 October
14 readers
Finance stops trusting the dashboard after day five
0:00 / 0:14
“Because I don’t trust it after the fifth of the month.”Dana R. · interview 07 · 04:35
Fig. 4An insight page. Readers hear the clip and see who said it.
From the field09
From the field.
“
I stopped writing readout decks. Now I send one page, and people actually press play on the quotes.
PLPriya LindqvistResearch lead, Larkmere
“
Our designers search Fieldnotes before they ask me. That was the whole point.
TWTomasz WrenSenior researcher, Tidelock“
In our first week we found the same complaint in two studies run nineteen months apart.
AOAdaeze OkaforHead of research, Fernhaven
researchers keep their interviews here
4,2004,200
moments tagged so far
1.31.3 million
median time to find a quote
3838 seconds
free readers for every researcher
1111
Rates11
Subscription rates.
Readers are always free. You pay for the people who tag.
Yearly billing gives you two months free.
Feature
Reader
$0free, always
For stakeholders who read and listen
Researcher
$18per editor a month
For people who run and tag interviews
Team
$32per editor a month
For teams who share one taxonomy
InterviewsRead anything sharedUnlimitedUnlimited
Transcription—Not included20 hours a month60 hours a month per editor
Tags and patternsViewTag, search and confirmPlus a shared taxonomy
Insight pagesRead and commentPublishPublish with review
Prices exclude VAT. Billed in US dollars, euros or pounds.
Correspondence12
Letters to the editor.
Questions readers sent us this month, answered by the founder.
Dear editor,
Dear editor,
Dear editor,
Dear editor,
Dear editor,
Dear editor,
Sign-off14
Thank you for reading this far.
If any of this sounded like your last quarter, try Fieldnotes on the interviews you already have. Bring twenty and they’re on us. Tag a few, and see which of them already agree with each other.