# Give your review spreadsheet better nouns

A useful tagging system describes tasks, failures and consequences instead of filing everything under “UX.”

By AppRill Editorial · Published 2026-09-08
Canonical: https://apprill.app/blog/review-taxonomy-template

A spreadsheet with forty rows tagged “UX issue” has successfully organized very little.

Review analysis becomes useful when the labels help you choose a next action. Start with a small taxonomy that describes what happened, not which department might eventually receive the ticket.

## Use four columns

**Job:** What was the person trying to accomplish? Examples might include sharing a shopping list, exporting an invoice or setting a reminder.

**Failure:** What interrupted that job? Sync delay, missing control, confusing price, incorrect result and inaccessible text are different problems.

**Consequence:** What happened because of it? Repeated work, lost data, missed deadline, uncertainty or a minor annoyance suggest different levels of urgency.

**Context:** Which version, device, country, language or workflow is visible in the review? Unknown is a legitimate value.

## Keep one row close to one voice

A review can contain several issues, but do not multiply it into several independent customers. Use multiple tags on the same record, or retain a shared review identifier across extracted observations.

Add a short evidence excerpt for internal checking. If you publish an example, minimize quotation, attribute appropriately and remove personal information. Your theme summary should be understandable without reproducing an entire review.

## Test the labels on twenty reviews

If half the sample lands in “other,” refine the taxonomy. If two labels are impossible to distinguish consistently, merge them. A solo founder does not need a hundred-category research ontology to discover that an export button fails.

Keep a separate field for your interpretation. “User could not find export” is an observation. “Move export to the top navigation” is a proposed solution.

At the end, sort by repeated consequence and evidence strength, not simply by the number of tags. The best spreadsheet makes it easy to return to the original account and ask whether your product hypothesis still fits what the person said.


## Sources