Tips for user interviews

Talk to users to learn (Source)

Interviewing users isn’t always easy, but it’s often one of the most insightful and useful practices you can undertake to learn more about your users, your product, and the world at large

After five years in user research, and about 500 user interviews, I’ve gathered a few tips for those interested in evolving their practice. Hopefully a few of these are new to you. As always I’d welcome feedback and criticism of these tips from others experienced in the craft!.

Setting it all up

Find and recruit the right users

• Define users who best match the information you want to ascertain, typically those who use the product you are wanting to investigate
• Primary users will be those who use the product most often. Feel free to explore testing secondary or tertiary users as well.
• Incentives can help get users in the room, but be careful if utilizing incentives they are appropriate and not incentivizing individuals to be too kind in their answers.

Find the rights tools and right time

• Understand if you want to hold in person or remote interviews. In person interviews are often more personal and communicative, but can be harder to schedule to get researchers or participants to various locations. Remote research allows more participants in room, but may suffer from connection issues over internet. This may also depend on if you want to show any prototypes or products, or see context of the user.
• Use the contact methods easiest for your participants — Vsee, skype, google hangouts, telephone call. Gotomeeting or Google Hangouts are popular remote tools, though the former is a little more popular with legacy professionals. Confirm your participants will be able to participate and have access to the relevant tools and an internet connection
• The best interviews are somewhere between 60–120 minutes. After 60 minutes people may start to fade away, though you can get very deep into their workflows and needs in some cases beyond this time
• Have participants offer three available times and convert between relevant time zones. Match availability to the availability of your users — providers are much harder to schedule.
• Leave time between interviews in case things run long, and to give yourself time

Before you get in the room

• Print out copies of your user script, much easier to review paper. Ideally a second party is taking notes so the interviewer can focus on the script, the participant and the general workflow
• Have note pads or a separate computer to take notes — computers can be faster but physical note pads generally make interviewees more comfortable if interviewing in person. Bring lots of paper and pens or encourage your stakeholders to bring computers / paper and pens to take notes.
• Be sure you have a recording tool available for audio or audio/video/screen share. Be sure to have photo space available on your phone if you are taking photos of the user for presentation purposes

During the interview

Take good notes

• It can be helpful to capture exact quotes for use in presentation later — quotes are powerful.
• Coding your notes with a system makes it much easier to process these notes later. We provide an example coding system below.

Be a great interviewer

• Start slowly, be personal: It can help to start slowly with demographic questions, and also tell a personal anecdote e.g. “Sorry I’m late, I was just getting back from my kid’s recital”
• Encourage speak aloud: Encourage participants to speak aloud their thoughts at all times if they are reviewing designs or product, and help them understand that we want to know why they are doing things
• Remind them that negative feedback is okay: At every step of the way, remind participants that anything bad or confusing should be spoken about, that negative feedback is very useful for us. Otherwise, participants may be concerned about hurting your feelings.
• Ask five whys: Always ask why five times if needed, to get to the core of the user needs. For example, “I am clicking this button” (why?) “Because it’s here” (why?) “I think it does x” (why?) “Because I’m used to seeing buttons like this when I do a similar thing on website X”, (why?) “Because it’s an essential piece of my day I do this 100 times a day”
• Talk about frequency: Participants will often speak of many things they love and hate during the course of an interview. It’s super important to understand how often (how many times a day, a week, what % of the time, etc.) these interactions occur to truly gauge the value of time saved and pain of the user.
• Keep participants on track: At times, it’s helpful to push certain types of feedback to the end of the session or steer participants back to the subject at hand
• Deviate when needed: At times, if the participant is talking about a rich line of inquiry or knowledge that is not right on script, feel free to deviate slightly if you want to get more information on the topic, as long as you keep your key goals in mind
• Deal in extremes: If you ask a user what they like, they may give you a list of 10 things with no priority. If you ask “What is your favorite thing” you get an immediate sense of what is most important. Closing questions deal in extremes but throughout the interview you may want to go to extremes.
• Don’t lead and avoid specialized terminology: When phrasing questions, avoid specific terminology and try to keep questions vague to prevent value judgements. This helps users more accurately express their feelings, while also helping you as the interviewer understand what they would call a thing vs. what we have decided to call a thing (using user-created language is generally better for the UI and useful findgins) e.g. “How do you feel about this thing?” vs. “What do you like about this coollingo button”?
• Let out the genie: In closing with a participant, try some unique questions to let them rethink their previous answers. A favorite is “If you had a magic genie that could do anything for you, what would you have your genie do?” By removing restrictions (and the user’s responsibility to enact any change) you get some interesting and novel responses with this one that haven’t been raised the entire hour before.
• Pull back the curtain: In closing with a participant, you might want to let them know a bit more detail about why the interview is happening, and how you as designer or researcher are thinking about the project or space so far. While this biases the user, at this stage you can get some potentially novel recommendations on functionality, while also giving the user a better sense of the value of their time that day and how their input will become actionable.

Putting it all together

• Start by considering your stakeholders and original goals. Do you need a presentation and a meeting? Should you sit down with some of your stakeholders ahead of time? What kind of information are they interested in? What kinds of presentation do they respond best to? By determining who your audience is, you can help shape the way your findings are presented.
• Consolidate your notes and recordings into a wikipage or Google Doc publicly available for stakeholders to review and see progress if desired, though often stakeholders will prefer to review summary and top finding presentation.
• To decompress findings, consider an affinity wall system that invites individuals to move and interact with data. By separating every idea and quote into a sticky note, and grouping these notes as a team into themes, you avoid bias and develop a highly visible way to showcase research.
• Review these groupings with other stakeholders and evolve the affinity wall before identifying top findings. Consider how important / impactful each grouping is: can we solve this issue directly? Do we need leadership buy-in to tackle this problem?
• Take these top findings and develop them into a simple powerpoint presentation that can be shared and presented to leadership and others. Consider weighing cost and value and alternative solutions. Explain the method, findings, potential suggestions, and include an expansive appendix for ancillary information, all while leaving stakeholders room to contribute.
• In the end, no one-size-fits-all solution exists for presenting solutions. It’s highly dependent on your stakeholders and needs — something much lighter may suffice in some cases and not others.

Conclusion

User interviews are an amazing way to get feedback and dig deeper into needs and values — the underpinning to any good designer’s work. So follow these tips and let me know if you have any more!