Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal

Summary

A guide for researchers who want a deep dive into the craft of conducting interviews and learning how to improve conversation facilitation with lots of examples and practical tips.

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Key Takeaways

I’ve arranged the key takeaways according to the chapters of the book and would recommended diving into the chapters that resonate with you for specific nuggets of wisdom.

• Chapter 1: The Importance of Interviewing in Design

  A user researcher’s goal is to gather information about users in order to support the organisation when creating products, services and more. It’s about:

  • Deeply studying people, ideally in their context

  • Exploring not only their behaviours but also the meaning behind those behaviours

  • Making sense of the data using inference, interpretation, analysis and synthesis

  • Using those insights to point toward a design, service, product or other solution.

  Interviewing is valuable:

  • To identify new opportunities, before you know what could be designed

  • To refine design hypotheses, when you have some ideas about what will be designed

  • To redesign and relaunch existing products and services, when you have history in the marketplace

• Chapter 2: A Framework for Interviewing

  • Before an interview, check your bias and worldview at the door - the interview is about the participant not you. Approach with bland and broad curiosity.

  • During an interview, the aim is to go from question to answer to question to stories. Build rapport, listen and notice the tipping points.

• Chapter 3: Getting Ready to Conduct Your Interviews

  1. Establish Objectives

  2. Recruitment [1-2weeks]

  3. Field Guide / interview guide / protocol

  4. Scheduling Interviews

  5. Participant Release and NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreements)

  6. Incentives

• Chapter 4: More Than Just Asking Questions

  • Prepared physical materials can be used to facilitate interviews such as: Mapping, concept formats (story board, physical mockup, wireframe), casual card sort or homework as primer for interview

  • Avoid presenting interpretations via a questions. Rather only ask explicit questions following an implication - the aim of the question is to find out for sure from the subject’s perspective, rather than leaving things to your own inference.

• Chapter 5: Key Stages of the Interview

  1. Crossing the threshold - before we get started…

  2. Restating objectives

  3. Kick off questions - So to start, maybe introduce yourself and tell us about what your job is here?

  4. Accept the awkwardness

  5. The tipping point

  6. Reflection and projection. By this time, you’ve presumably captured many of the details around process, behaviours, usage etc. You are ready to move into the higher level part of the inquiry. Now your participant is thinking about the big picture, their responses can drift into sweeping statements about themselves, their goals, their dreams, their past, the future, our society etc.

  7. The soft close

• Chapter 6: How to Ask Questions

  • Embrace Awkward Silences: ask your question and let it stand. (In your head, repeat “allow silence”)

  • Managing the flow: It can take most of the interview to align pacing between an interviewer and a participant. Key is to slow - yourself - down.

  • Getting to even more of the answer: for most threads in most interviews, you need to use a series of questions to get to the information you want. It’s not that people are being difficult; they just don’t know what it is that you want to know. While listening to participant answers, be vigilant. Do they appear to have understood what you intended by the questions or have they gone somewhere else with it. Their interpretation may be more revealing than what you intended.

  • Embrace Participant’s Worldview

  • Don’t enter lecture mode: Ask yourself, if explaining something is better for you or better for them? Don’t correct their perceptions or terminology if the only outcome is educating them. Advocate for participants, not for your product.

  • If you have to fix something, wait until the end

• Chapter 7: Documenting the Interview

  • Taking Notes: be descriptive not interpretive. Seperate notes from assumptions: Worked 14 hours a day for 10 years vs. is Larry a workaholic?

  • Audio recording - backup to video recording

  • Video recording

  • Debrief after interview - you must absolutely allow time for debriefing after each interview

  • Share field highlights - rapid, top of mind version of the session to key stakeholders

• Chapter 8: Optimising the Interview

  • When participant isn’t the right kind of user: it’s a chance to review the interpretation of the screener

  • When participant won’t stop talking: link what they are saying to the focus area - “so how does that experience impact ___?” or “So sorry to interrupt, would love to come back to to this but just aware of the time and want to make sure we cover the topics we are here to learn about.”

  • When interview is very short: warm them up ahead of time by emailing key questions to think about ahead of time. Make request for follow up interview if they seem keen.

• Chapter 9: Making an Impact with Your Research

  • You want to make sure that data becomes insights and insights become opportunities for new products, features, services, designs and strategies AS WELL AS for teams to embrace a user centred approach to their work.

  • Analysing and Synthesising interview data

    • Analysis = breaking larger pieces into smaller ones (interviews and transcripts into anecdotes and stories)

    • Synthesis = combining multiple pieces into something new (building themes, implications and opportunities)

    • STEP 1: Top-line report - based on early impressions not formal analysis of data. The things that jumped out after the interviews.

    • STEP 2: Deeply process data then capture into presentation of findings