How we conduct user interviews and user tests at Clue: Part Two
To learn about our process, read Part One.
Interview sessions
Once we have someone in the office, on the phone or on Google Hangouts, how do we carry out user interviews?
Ideally, an interview will teach us one or more of the following things:
- Teach me something about people. Who are they? What’s important to them? What’s their story?
- Teach me something about how and why people use Clue. When do they starting thinking about it? What motivates them to look for something like it? Do they do research? Who do they ask?
- Teach me something about competing alternatives. What does Clue replace? How is it perceived against what they were doing before? How do people weigh up different options?
The typical questions we ask
I break the interview questions down into three categories.
Introductory questions
I’ll start off with some super basic questions to get people warmed up. Some people find the experience a little weird at first, so this is an opportunity to get them used to the process.
Questions:
- Tell me about yourself?
- What do you do for a living?
- How long have you lived in Berlin?
The standards questions
After the breaking the ice, I’ll move onto some questions to get baseline insights from them. To give examples, they include questions such as:
- Which device do you use?
- How long are you using Clue?
- What do you use Clue for?
- What categories do you track in Clue?
- How often do you track?
I’ll ask questions about how they searched for such solutions:
- How did you hear about Clue?
- Do you currently use other female health apps? What for and why?
- Did you switch from another app to Clue? Which one? Why did you switch?
And I’ll ask questions about usage:
- Beside your period, do you track any other options? Which ones? Why?
- Have you entered anything into Clue today?
- When do you usually do it? At what time of the day? Where? (I want to know if they mostly do instant data entry or a posteriori tracking)
- Can you show me how you do it? (and I would about look what settings the user has set up for themselves within the app, such as active period prediction or fertile window prediction)
And end with some open-ended questions:
- What else in the app do you use? (What features are used and how)
The research questions
The questions here will depend on the project we’re working on. One example we worked on was a project related to birth control pills.
We started off with our problem: people who were on the pill don’t have a cycle to track per say, so they weren’t seeing as much value from Clue as those who did have a cycle to track. Therefore, we wanted to see if we could make Clue better for people taking the pill.
General principles for our interviews
You’ll find plenty resources on asking great questions in interview. However, here’s a few principles we try to keep in mind at Clue.
Ask open-ended questions
Imagine someone is looking at your app with a furrowed brow. I find it tempting to say something like, “Frustrating, right?” to confirm my existing hypothesis that something about the app is, indeed, frustrating.
I’ve learned to ask instead questions such as, “What are you thinking right now?”
It’s very tempting to jump for leading questions, yet I’m always surprised by what I learn when I don’t ask leading questions.
Ask questions like Louis Theroux
The BBC documentary maker Louis Theroux gets amazing responses in his interviews.
He’s a master at making his subjects feel comfortable in informal settings while asking naive questions of the basics.
Similarly, in user interviews, it’s tempting to skip over questions we feel we already know the answer to.
For example, I’ll often ask where do they click to enter bleeding.
I work at Clue, so I already know what’s coming next: “I click on the red button on the home screen.”
But I’ll still feel slightly weird asking it! What if they reply: “Obviously I click on the red button in the middle of the screen. Hard to miss it! You think I am an idiot or what?!”
Most of the time they answer as I’d expect, but occasionally I get something like: “I go to the calendar, and then I press on the day green circle for today.”
The last response is the type of interesting response that gives us ideas for improving the app.
Awkward pauses are fine
It’s tempting to jump in with confirmatory comments such as “sure” once they’ve finished talking.
However, I’ve found leaving a couple seconds of silence allows the person the opportunity to develop on the topic if they feel they have something more to say, which is often the case. It is even more crucial when you work on a topic that can be personally sensitive such as menstrual health.
These pauses can feel a little awkward in the beginning, because it feels natural to jump in with a confirming statement to conclude the thought.
Turning qualitative insights into product
Once you done some interviews, the questions comes up about how you turn that raw material into making decisions about your product’s design.
With a digital product, you don’t have a linear design process, but instead a series of loops as you iterate and develop the product.
The next step will be to taking all the raw data and synthesising it into a concrete product.
What I try to do is having a one-pager document which summarizes the findings with a list of pain points that I then turn into opportunities that I will try to incorporate in the design of the new feature.
At Clue, we don’t overly separate the people doing user research from the people designing the product. Perhaps this is helped by the fact that we are only a handful of designers. It does means that research doesn’t get lost and is directly used to fuel product development.
An import aspect in this process is sharing your insights with the rest of the team. I got a great insight at a UX training from the NNG Group in London: they commented that short videos of user tests or user interviews are more effective at helping your team understand a point than simply telling your team the insight yourself.
It isn’t, however, something we are currently doing at Clue. Instead I try to include new team members in at least one user session as part of their onboarding at Clue.
Regularly talking to users is something is easier said than done, especially if you want to talk to a diverse set of people regularly over time. It is however an incredibly rich source of insights for making a better product. On a personal level, I also find it a very motivating and inspiring experience to talk to the people who use the product I am designing on a daily basis.
