SXSW - Diving Deep: Best Practices For Interviewing Users
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The document outlines best practices for user interviews, highlighting the importance of planning, building rapport, and active listening. It suggests various tactics such as using natural language and being silent after asking questions to foster deeper insights. Additionally, it emphasizes the need for preparation through interview guides and the flexibility to adapt to the interview flow for effective data collection.
SXSW - Diving Deep: Best Practices For Interviewing Users
- 1. Diving Deep: Best Practices For Interviewing Users Don’t miss the accompanying audio!#DeepDiveSteve Portigal
- 2. Portigal Consulting is a bite-sized California firm that helps companies discover and act on new insights about their customers and themselves
- 3. The research and design processPlanInterviewAnalyze/ SynthesizeDesignImplementToday’s focus
- 4. Today’s focusThe research and design processPlanInterviewDesignImplementAnalyze/ Synthesize
- 5. Typical development lifecycleWhat to make or doRefine & prototypeLaunchIterate & improve
- 6. Interviewing through the development cycleTake a fresh look at peopleWhat to make or doRefine & prototypeLaunchIterate & improve
- 7. Interviewing through the development cycleUse existing ideas as hypothesesWhat to make or doRefine & prototypeLaunchIterate & improve
- 8. Interviewing through the development cycleWhat to make or doRefine & prototypeLaunchHistory provides context to explore new ideasIterate & improve
- 9. Four deceptively simple tacticsQuestions without answersNatural languageSilence 1Silence 2
- 10. Tactic #1: Natural languageTalk like your subject talks!
- 11. Tactic #2: Questions without answersDon’t give away the answers you are looking for
- 12. After you ask your question, be silentTactic #3: Silence 1
- 13. After they’ve answered you, be silentTactic #4: Silence 2
- 14. Fieldwork principleLet go of your perspectiveEmbrace their perspectiveLet go, Luke!
- 15. A failure to embrace (1 of 2)Client: So the concept of transferring, burning, and syncing, can you talk a little about those three concepts? So transfer, burn, and sync. Just do you understand the difference?Interviewee: Transfer, burn, sync. Burn is when I’m actually putting it onto some kind of disc.Okay…Transferring is I guess when I transfer the files from one place to the other.Mm-hmm…Whether it’s to a device or to a different drive or whatever or into the program I guess. And syncing, well, I know the phone always comes up and says it’s syncing, when it’s syncing up to the files or syncing up to the computer or stuff like that. That’s the only time I think I’ve ever really heard that.(cont’d)
- 16. A failure to embrace (2 of 2)Client: So the only other question I have left in this area is: Would you expect to manually decide what music goes on your devices or would you rather that the machine does it for you?Interviewee: Decide what I want on my…?Let’s say your library is here on this machine, and you have a device, would you want it to put as much as it could put on from the library from the device when it’s connected to your computer?If I could hold it… if the device itself could actually hold all the files, I would love that, if it automatically…Just knew.Just knew that it wasn’t on there, the same thing when…what do you call it - when I have to go into the program and actually have it… downl…uhh, now I’m confused in what I should call it.No, no, don’t worry about it!
- 17. Before you start doing interviews, do a team-wide brain dump of all your assumptions and expectationsGo to where your users are rather than asking them to come to youDon’t dress like you are going to workNo logo clothing (especially for consumers)Arrive relaxedWell fed
- 19. Your bathroom needs taken care ofMake the interview about the interviewAgree explicitly that you are going to Learn about Paul rather than Identify NextGen Opportunities for RoadmapBe comfortable asking questions you (think you) know the answers toHOWTO let goSometimes the unpredictable and “real” nature of interviews will ensure that you do indeed let go
- 20. Building rapport, the soft skill
- 21. Building rapport, the soft skillYou can think of rapport as the energy that makes for a fantastic interview that all parties are enthused about during and afterIt’s your responsibility to build this rapportBe selective about social gracesToo little small talk is rude
- 22. Too much small talk is confusing since this isn’t a social callBe selective about talking about yourselfReveal personal information to give them permission to share
- 23. Otherwise, think “OMG! Me too!” without saying itThere’s a visceral tipping point where interviews shift from a back-and-forth question/answer/ question/answer exchange to question/story. That’s how rapport-building pays off.
- 24. Listening is the rapport engineDon’t interrupt!Be silent (see Tactics 3 and 4)Maintain eye contactHead-nodding and mm-hmmAcknowledgement phrases: “I see”Your mm-hmms can be frustrating when editing interview video, but leading a great interview is more important, so intermediate interviewers should just let ‘er rip.
- 25. Listening body languageYes!Not so much.
- 26. Expert listeningYou can demonstrate that you are listening by asking questions!Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up
- 27. “Earlier, you told us that…”
- 28. “I want to go back to something else you said…”Signal your transitions: “Great, now I’d like to move onto a totally different topic”This level of listening is not how we normally talk to each otherRemember that you are interviewing, not having a friendly chatThis is really hard
- 29. Find your personal styleThe Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
- 30. The interview guide (or field guide)A more-than-you-can-ask set of questionsShare with team to align on issues of concernEspecially with multiple teams in the fieldHelps you pre-visualize the flow of the sessionInclude questions as well as other methods that you’ll usePrepping an interview guide means that you may not need to use the interview guideThis is counter-intuitive
- 31. It does come in handy during freeze-up moments
- 32. Scan it over to see what else you want to cover
- 35. Also include in the planObservations to coverE.g.: Look at fridge contents, beverage storage, and recycling locationsA shot list, which could include:Entrance lobby
- 36. Server closet
- 37. Form storage
- 40. Participant in front of their cars
- 41. Action shot of us doing the interviewsInclude other methods
- 45. Why so many types of questions?Real interviews aren’t as simple as asking a question, getting an answer, and then moving onto the next question in your list. You are unlikely to get to the actual answer without asking a few different questions a few different ways. You need a range of tools and techniques. And you need to feel when you haven’t got to the real answer yet so you can keep going.
- 46. Prepare for exploding questionsWell, my cousin never tells me when she has an updated bank balance so I figured I would handle it myself. That’s why I signed up for the PayPal service, I think it’s them but maybe not.Coping techniquesWait until these issues come up organically, without you having to askMake notes on your field guide about what you want to loop back to so you don’t forgetTriage based on what’s most pressing for your topicTriage based on what makes the best follow-up, to demonstrate listeningWhy does this matter?Let’s find out what service this is?!Okay.I decided I had to spend the money I had from last month in order to save month’s money and this service was going to help me do that. Even if it’s not the same password that my cousin would be usingI don’t understand her financial model…Why does she expect that it would be the same?
- 47. Managing others in the fieldClient: So, really interesting the sort of things that you as old Derek used to value, such as efficiency of time, and some of those things have now influenced the new Derek.Derek: Right.Steve: Maybe that sort of begs a larger question…We’ve offered you this idea of old versus new you, but how do you think about this transition?Derek:Yeah, I don’t really see it.
- 48. Managing others in the fieldWe lead a thirty-minute training session for everyone who will join us in the fieldEnsure one person leads the interview and clarify the role of the “second interviewer”They should ask questions, but stay in the “chapter” that we’re inDuring our debriefs, we offer feedback and coaching about the process, if possible
- 49. Getting better at interviewingPractice with hallway or other serendipitous micro-interviewsWrite surveys and participant screeners to practice crafting questions out of the moment How do you get to Carnegie Hall?Practice, man, practice!
- 50. Participant screeners as asking practiceA good way to practice both framing a question and the empathic exercise of thinking through the respondent’s user experience with that question
- 51. Write and take surveysDevelop your own critical eye (and interviewer’s voice) by looking for bad examples and identifying just what’s wrong with them
- 52. We learn from mistakes and mishapsCollect and share war stories with other interviewersTHANX 4 NOTHING KITTEH
- 53. Coming in 2012!A book by Steve PortigalThe Art and Craft of User Research Interviewinghttp://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/user-interviews/
Editor's Notes
- #7: Even though Don Norman says this doesn’t work because it didn’t lead to the airplane, etc., this is a lot of our work