Interviewing Users. Steve Portigal
each interview will be unique, making it hard to objectively tally data points across the sample. Although we are typically interviewing in context, it’s not fully naturalistic. A tool that intercepts and observes users who visit a website is capturing their actual behavior, but sitting with users and having them show you how they use a website is an artifice.
Interviews are not good at predicting future behavior, especially future purchase intent or uncovering price expectations. Asking those questions in an interview will reveal mental models that exist today, which can be insightful, but won’t necessarily be accurate.
But interviewing can be used in combination with other techniques. In a note earlier in this chapter, I described how a quantitative study helped focus our contextual interviewing and observations. In other situations, we’ve used an exploratory interviewing study to identify topics for a global quantitative segmentation study. We’ve combined a Central Location Test (where larger groups watched a demo in a single location such as a research facility and filled out a survey) with in-home interviews simultaneously and used the results of both studies to get a deeper understanding of the potential for the product. It can be valuable to combine a set of approaches and get the advantages of each.
Is interviewing considered to be user research? Is it market research? Is it design research? I can’t answer those questions any better than you can! The answer is: it depends. Whether or not you ally yourself or your methods with any one of those areas, you can still do great work uncovering new meaning and bringing it into the organization to drive improvement and growth. At the end of the day, isn’t that what we care about? I’ll let someone else argue about the overarching definition matrix.
To Interview Well, One Must Study
Much of the technique of interviewing is based on one of our earliest developmental skills: asking questions (see Figure 1.5). We all know how to ask questions, but if we asked questions in interviews the way we ask questions in typical interactions, we would fall short. In a conversational setting, we are perhaps striving to talk at least 50 percent of the time, and mostly to talk about ourselves. But interviewing is not a social conversation. Falling back on your social defaults is going to get you into trouble!
FIGURE 1.5 Childhood is marked by frequent, inevitable question-asking.
Interviewing users involves a special set of skills. It takes work to develop these skills. The fact that it looks like an everyday act can actually make it harder to learn how to conduct a good interview because it’s easy to take false refuge in existing conversational approaches. Developing your interviewing skills is different than developing a technical skill (say, milkshake-machine recalibration) because you would have nothing to fall back on if learning about milkshake machines. With interviewing, you may need to learn how to override something you already know. Think of other professionals who use verbal inquiry to succeed in their work: whether it is police officers interrogating a suspect or a lawyer cross-examining an opposing witness or a reference librarian helping a patron, the verbal exchange is a deliberate, learned specialty that goes beyond what happens in everyday conversation. For you as an interviewer, it’s the same thing.
The Impact of Interviewing
Interviewing creates a shared experience, often a galvanizing one, for the product development team (which can include researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product management, and beyond). In addition to the information we learn from people and the inspiration we gain from meeting them, there’s a whole other set of transformations we go through. You might call it empathy—say a more specific understanding of the experience and emotions of the customer—which might even be as simple as seeing “the user” or “the customer” as a real live person in all their glorious complexity. But what happens when people develop empathy for a series of individuals they might meet in interviews? They experience an increase in their overall capacity for empathy.1
This evolution in how individual team members view themselves, their design work, and the world around them starts to drive shifts in the organizational culture (see Figure 1.6). This capacity for empathy is not sufficient to change a culture, but it is necessary.
More tactically, these enlightened folks are better advocates for customers and better champions for the findings and implications of what has been learned in interviews.
The wonderful thing about these impacts is that they come for free (or nearly). Being deliberate in your efforts to interview users will pay tremendous dividends for your products, as well as the people who produce it.
FIGURE 1.6 Team experiences that are challenging and out-of-the-ordinary create goodwill and a common sense of purpose.
Summary
It’s become increasingly common, perhaps even required, for companies to include user research in their design and development process. Among many different approaches to user research, interviewing (by whatever name you want to call it) is a deep dive into the lives of customers.
• Interviewing can be used in combination with other techniques, such as identifying key themes through interviews and then validating them quantitatively in a subsequent study.
• At a distance, interviewing looks just like the everyday act of talking to people, but interviewing well is a real skill that takes work to develop.
• Interviewing can reveal new “frames” or models that flip the problem on its head. These new ways of looking at the problem are crucial to identifying new, innovative opportunities.
• Interviewing can be used to help identify what could be designed, to help refine hypotheses about a possible solution that is being considered, or to guide the redesign of an existing product that is already in the marketplace
• Teams who share the experience of meeting their users are enlightened, aligned, and more empathetic.
CHAPTER 2
A Framework for Interviewing
Check Your Worldview at the Door
Embrace How Other People See the World
When Wayne Gretzky apocryphally1 explained his hockey success as “I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be,” he identified a key characteristic of many experts: the underlying framework that drives everything. This platonically idealized Gretzky could have revealed any number of tactics such as his grip, or the way he shifts his weight when he skates. Keith Richards explains his guitar