what to consider before interviewing user's
user doesn't dictate the direction of your work, you do!
Remember: Research is for inspiration and understanding the problem, but we don’t just ask the user what they want and do that.
While our users might have a solution in mind, it’s on us to ensure that we’re addressing the right problem and creating the best possible solution with the resources available. Don’t get me wrong user feedback is highly valuable, but you are still the professional who will make sense of all the artefacts collected from talking to these people.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
― Henry Ford
What is often overlooked but vital to know before running research:
Scheduling is super tough.
Finding the right people to talk to can take time. If you can’t talk to a particular person, think about who else might have the same experience. Tell people what’s in it for them to get their time. Entice people with a gift or voucher if you have to.
Everybody likes to be heard.
In the end, most people love having a conversation with us – because we’re not selling them anything but letting them talk about what’s most essential for them too. You will often find out people love to help if you ask politely.
Trust is very vital.
In order to get unbiased and open opinions it is most important to build trust and create a safe environment. Explain how you preserve privacy and get explicit consent. Don’t complicate this.
Positive impact on the relationship.
Having conversations on eye level and working on solutions for interesting challenges together always has a positive impact on the customer relationship. Ideally, we can share back the outcome of our conversation. You can even convert as your first customer because they’ve already contributed.
Recruiting people for user research is not easy.
Have a recruitment objective, here are things to consider.
What are the overall goals of the research?
How many participants do you need?
What’s the depth of the interviews?
Do you want to run it online or physically?
If physically, what location are you going to use?
How are you going to plan the logistics?
Is it gender specific? How many males? How many females? And how many gender-neutral people do you need to not bias your findings?
What technicality are you looking at? Mobile or web savvy?
Put an interview guide in place.
What questions are you going to ask during the introduction?
Who are you? And why are you doing the interview? Introduce yourself first, and tell them about your background, and your work too. People often open up to people who they know a bit.
Get to know the interviewee. Everything that’s related to the task, demography, savvy, age, occupation etc.
Have a detailed summary of the interview, what is the interview about? Remember you might have up to 10 people to interview. It depends. You want to save yourself some time and automate all the redundant tasks.
Is there an NDA? It is good you let the person you’re interviewing know about this beforehand. Sending this ahead before the interview date is often the best way, to save time and make sure the user understands what they’re signing before onboarding them for the interview.
Data protection agreements should be put in place. How you are going to use their information, the photos, the videos, the audio etc.
Introduce your task, and what you want them to do. Ask the question if it’s about extracting information.
Also, keep in mind as you continue with your interview that it is not a survey – you don’t need to ask every question you’ve collected. Let the conversation flow naturally and only guide your interviewee back if you don’t learn anything new from the information they’re providing.
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