- Types of Research
- Surveys
- Preparing for User Interviews
- Conducting User Interviews
- Affinity Mapping
- After You Empathize, You Define
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Conducting User Interviews
Once you’ve put together the user interview script, you’re finally ready to start talking to users. Hopefully, you find users to speak with via the screener survey or another recruitment method that homes in on finding the ideal candidate, but you can also ask friends, family, or strangers, provided you think they will be representative of the target users.
After you schedule interviews, start having the conversations that will establish the backbone of research efforts and filter into future design thinking work.
Finding Participants
Finding the right users to interview is crucial. Since design thinking builds off itself as you move through each step in the process, the users you speak with become the foundation of the product you build. Thus, it’s ideal if you find the “right” people to speak with.
Who are the right people, though? That’s up to you and your team to decide. Who do you want to target? Are you building a mobile recipe app? Then you’ll probably want to talk to people who cook a lot or are interested in cooking but are blocked in some way. Are you building a learning dashboard? Then you’ll want to talk with students, or with teachers who would manage those dashboards. Try to think of the ideal types of people who would use and love the product you want to build.
What about the right number of people? For user interviews, this isn’t clear. For complex persona work, for example, you need to talk with a lot of people to develop a robust, clear understanding of the market and your users. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have the time or money to invest in this. For quicker projects, you can make proto-personas, or archetypes of your users, with just a handful of interviews. To start, I’d recommend at least six—that should give you enough data to work with when analyzing your results. If you’re looking for more nuanced details for your personas, I’d recommend somewhere from 15 to 20 participants.
After you have an idea of who and how many people to interview, you need to find them. You can do that in a few ways.
Surveys
Sending out screener surveys is an effective way to find users to interview. You can write a survey that is structured to home in on the ideal user. If you have an idea of your users—such as that they shop online often—then you can write a survey and include questions about shopping habits. You can reach out to the users who indicate that they shop a lot.
It’s common to send out screener surveys that answer high-level questions you have about the market (perhaps how often people take a certain behavior) and gain some information about market trends. For the users who seem promising, bring them in to talk. It’s a two-tiered approach to getting really good information.
It’s common to receive surveys in emails, on websites, and even in specialized groups via Slack, Discord, or message forums. When researching your project, you can do the same. Try to find the communities that could have the users you want. If you want to interview writers, try looking at common blogging sites like Medium. To talk with gamers, you can hop onto popular Discord servers and drop a link to your survey to see who answers.
Social Media
You can find the popular communities for your users and post to social media asking for user interview participants. If you want to find people who like guitar, you could head to Facebook and post to guitar groups.
Alternatively, if you have a social media presence, you can ask your friends and family to participate in research to help you. This is a common method for students, for example, who may not have the budget or network to afford compensating individuals for their time.
Recruitment Services
To recruit users, you can also rely on companies like UserTesting.com, Mechanical Turk, or Maze. These companies find users for you, for a fee. Although potentially costly, they help filter for demographic information, which lets you home in on the best user possible. Additionally, the user population has already opted in to being involved in research, so you know that whoever passes your criteria will want to be involved in a research study. Since user interviews are so crucial to the entire design thinking process, it’s common to make the investment upfront to get the best quality you can.
Guerilla Testing
On the opposite end of the spectrum of targeted service-driven user recruitment is guerilla testing. This is a do-it-yourself approach to recruitment—you go to a physical location where your target users congregate and talk with them yourself.
If you know you want to talk with avid book readers, go to a bookstore and find strangers willing to answer a few questions. Or perhaps you want to talk with nature lovers—go to a park.
This method has the highest variability, because you don’t know if the willing people will be good interview candidates. However, it’s a faster way to get results and a low-cost way to do so.
Each method of recruitment has its pros and cons and can be valid depending on your time, budget, and comfort level. Once you have your users, the next step is to conduct the interview.
Interviewing Your Participants
After all your preparation, it’s time to interview! This is one of the most exciting parts of the process—when you speak directly to the people you want to help. It can be challenging to have these conversations because there are so many ways to navigate them, and it takes practice to become good at doing interviews.
Your users are probably nervous too! You’re about to ask them a bunch of potentially personal questions about what they do and what they think, and they might not know what to expect.
Luckily, you can do some things to make this process easier.
Make Sure Users Are Comfortable
At the beginning of the conversation, ensure your users are comfortable. Asking if they want any water or need anything before the interview starts can go a long way toward making them more comfortable.
If your users aren’t comfortable, the conversation will be awkward, and it will be difficult to learn from them. Start by asking them how they are doing today, then explain the interview process:
Hi there! I’m [name], and I’m working on a problem to better understand [issue]. How are you doing today?
We’re meeting today to discuss your experiences with [issue]. We’re going to spend around [amount of time] talking. Do you have any questions for me before we begin?
Capture Audio/Video
To make sure you capture all the information revealed during the interview, record the conversation. If you can, you can avoid taking notes. This has a powerful, subtle effect—you can focus completely on the conversation and the user, fully engaging them in the interview, rather than focus on taking notes or writing down a quote. Ideally, there is both a notetaker and a facilitator present, but you can get by with just yourself and rely on technology to record the conversation.
When recording a conversation, make sure you have your user’s permission:
Would you mind if I record our conversation? It will be helpful to have a record to refer to. I promise that I’ll use it only for internal purposes, to share with my team and reflect on, and it won’t be used publicly.
Ask Why/Clarifying a Response
When asking questions from your script, it’s easy to stick to each question and move through it, like going down a shopping list. However, make sure you have received a satisfactory answer to your question before proceeding to the next one. If you don’t fully understand a user’s motivation behind an answer, you need to ask for clarification. Simply asking “why?” can get you that clarity.
Imagine the following conversation:
Do you like our app?
“Yes!
Perfect! Moving on…
The interviewer missed an opportunity to learn why the user likes the app. Knowing that reason helps you probe into motivation, attitudes, and feelings around the behaviors and opinions you seek to understand. Let’s see what could happen if you follow up on that response.
Do you like our app?
Yes!
Interviewer pauses for a moment… why do you like our app?
Because it’s easy to use!
…Why is it easy to use?
Because I understand where everything’s placed, and it’s just there, ready for me to use!
Ah, OK, great!
Another tactic you can use in place of asking why is silence. If you don’t say anything, your participant may feel compelled to fill that silence with more information.
Do you like our app?
Yes!
………
…because it’s easy to use!
………
…I understand where everything’s placed and it’s just there, ready for me to use!
Ah, OK, great!
User interviews are really challenging to do, and to do well. To see an example of a talented researcher (FIGURE 2.22) in action, check out this great video where a researcher speaks with a participant about her experiences (www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNMTJTnrTQQ).
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After the Interview
Once the interview concludes, thank your participant for their time. If there’s any follow-up, like payment, make sure you have a plan for that as well.
As for the content of the interview, you can do a few things to make it easier for you to analyze your results.
Take Notes Post Interview
Immediately after the interview, write down key observations. The conversation is still fresh in your mind, and you’ll want to highlight things. Some shorthand notes of where to look back, or overall impressions, will help you later.
Transcribe Audio into Text
Once you have the recording from the interview, it can be difficult to transcribe that information into design thinking artifacts like transcripts and pull quotes (which are really valuable for highlighting key insights from the conversation). Using audio transcription services like Otter.ai6 make this process a lot faster and will help you pull information once you’re ready to synthesize all your interviews.
Let’s Do It!
Let’s start finding some users to talk with for our project! You have the screener survey and the script. Now, you can send out that screener survey (if you haven’t already) to various forums and social media channels to start finding users to talk to.
Alternatively, if you want to spend a bit of money to find users, feel free to use some of the other resources discussed in this chapter to recruit users, like UserTesting.com7 or another recruitment service.
The goal of this activity is to speak to users for our project. Schedule six to eight interviews and start having conversations with your target users.
To make the interviews more successful and capture good data, try the following:
Be polite and explain the purpose of the interview—that you are looking to learn more about solo travelers and their experiences.
Ask permission to record, and remind the participants that conversations are private.
Ask follow-up questions if you don’t understand the core reason behind a participant’s answer. The question “why?” or silence after a response are perfect ways to get users to elaborate further.
Schedule breaks between your interviews to take notes and prepare for the next conversation. Even a few minutes of down time helps you reset and focus for the following interview.