A lot of NEXT's power lies in the ability to highlight & tag data in your notes – we call this highlighting. Highlights are added to the text content inside a note. A single highlight can have one or many tags associate with it. You can tag a single word, sentence, paragraph, tables, and more! This means that you can be more fine-granular with how you want to tag and break down your work into highlights, grouped or clustered by tag.
What to use tags for
Tagging helps you keep track of patterns that emerge across your data. For example, let’s say you're testing a prototype of a new feature you built for your app. Imagine each note in NEXT is a user test.
Here is some example content of an interview to illustrate how to use tagging:
I love the new layout of the app, however it seems navigating has become slower. I need to complete too many clicks to get where I want to be. I need to be able to navigate faster, because I'm losing time during organizing my interview. I'd love to see more of a "click-click-click" experience, or even keyboard navigation!
Given this example, you can use highlighting to tag "...it seems navigating has become slower" with navigation speed, and
“…however it’s becoming slower and slower. It seems to take a long time to open up initially” with performance, and “I'd love to see more of a "click-click-click" experience, or even keyboard navigation!” with feature request. You could tag "I need to be able to navigate faster..." with user need and navigation issue.
When you dive into your highlights page, finding back the results of this interview and the context becomes very easy.
For guidance on how to create a tagging taxonomy, you can read this article.
Create a highlight
To create a new highlight with your mouse:
Select the text you’d like to tag
When the dialog pops up, type a tag name into the input field
Choose an existing tag, or click Create… to create a new tag
Click outside the dialog to close it
☝️ Note: tags and highlights are shared across boards and are unique to a stage!
Browse for tags while highlighting
You can browse for existing tags instead of needing to search for tags by name when creating a new highlight on a note. After you’ve made your text selection, simply scroll through the list of tags in the dialog that opens. Here, you can also edit your tags; click on any of the tags to rename it or change its color.
View all highlights for a tag
To view all highlights for any tag:
Open the highlights side panel
Click on the filter icon
With the radio-button, select the tag you want to see highlights from
Select two or more tags to show highlights with those tags.The highlights will be filtered on tag automatically