Use codebooks and AutoCode

These steps happen inside the report, and are the same in the macOS app and in your browser.

A codebook is a set of tags organised into groups, each group with a colour. You can tag quotes by hand, install a ready-made codebook, or let the model propose tags. This page covers the mechanics; for what to tag for and how codes turn into findings, see Tag quotes to find meaning.

Tag by hand

On the Quotes page, press t on a quote and start typing. Suggestions come from your codebook, grouped and colour-coded. Press r to apply the last tag again to the next quote.

Install a codebook

Open the codebook panel and choose Codebook Library. Bristlenose ships several research codebooks you can install, including:

• Bristlenose UXR Codebook (general-purpose)
• The Elements of User Experience — Jesse James Garrett
• The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
• The User Experience Honeycomb — Peter Morville
• 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design — Jakob Nielsen
• Laws of UX — Jon Yablonski

Each tile carries one button: Install to add the codebook to your project, Uninstall to take it back out. Installing adds that codebook's groups and tags to your own; uninstalling removes them but keeps any AutoCode results, so you can reinstall instantly. For what each codebook brings and the authority behind it, see Codebook frameworks.

Create and edit your own

In the codebook panel you can add groups and tags, drag tags between groups, click a tag or title to rename it, and drop one tag onto another to merge them. Changes are saved to the project.

Turn a codebook on or off

Every installed codebook has a switch in its section header, mirrored by a status dot in the sidebar — blue when it's on, grey when it's off. Switch one off and its section folds to a one-line summary; its tags stay on your quotes, but their badges are hidden across the report and the codebook drops out of the tag sidebar and tag suggestions until you switch it back on. This is fully reversible and keeps every result. To take a codebook out of the project altogether, use Uninstall in the Codebook Library.

AutoCode

AutoCode asks the model to suggest a tag from your codebook for each quote. Press the ✦ button on a codebook section; the model proposes one tag per quote, each with a confidence score.

You then review the proposals on a confidence histogram with two thresholds:

• Proposals above the upper threshold are accepted.
• Proposals below the lower threshold are excluded.
• Those in between are left for you to accept or reject one at a time.

Tags accepted from AutoCode are recorded as coming from the model rather than from you. AutoCode needs a cloud provider — the default local model does not hold enough context to run it.