Beyond User Interviews: Personal Letters as a Qualitative Research Tool

BT Business User Research Specialist, Lakshmipriya explains how rethinking research methods opened up a whole new world of customer feedback.

Having regular interactions with our Business to Business (B2B) customers, allowed our User Research team to identify the inherent limitations of traditional user interviews and notice gaps in the usual one-on-one user interview sessions.

Despite their widespread use, these sessions often failed to yield the deep insights necessary for truly understanding our B2B customers. This prompted a re-evaluation of the traditional user interview sessions, leading us to explore an alternative approach to ask our customers to write personal letters describing their existing service and support relationship with BT.

Let’s dive in:

Rethinking User Interviews and their limitations

User interviews, or in-depth interviews, are a qualitative research method where the researcher holds a 30–to 60-minute conversation with a single participant. During the process, the researcher prepares and asks questions that explore a topic(s) to better understand the participants’ attitudes, beliefs, desires and experiences.

This traditional format allows for detailed responses and typically, the researcher notes the verbal responses. The conversation flows naturally from one question to the next, all the time focusing on the research topic. But we end up relying too much on them, believing it to be the best way to get stories from our customers. A question-answer format seems like the only way to gather deep insights.

However, we need to remember that the goal is to get customers to open up and express themselves honestly. Meaningful conversations and breakthrough thoughts happen when people feel comfortable and engaged. This is when we find the finest insights!

User interviews often results in fatigue and discomfort for the interviewer and the researcher, potentially stifling genuine expression. The rigid question-answer format can feel more like an interrogation than a dialogue, inhibiting participants from sharing openly. In such scenarios, the conversation falls flat. Creating a safe, non-judgmental environment is crucial to helping customers think freely. In addition, user interviews can be challenging for participants who struggle to process and express their thoughts quickly.

With these thoughts in mind, we started exploring other research methods to address the following questions:

• How can we break the usual question-answer format in a user interview?
• How can we help customers feel more at ease and express themselves better during interview sessions?

Exploring the Love and the Break-up Letter method:

User research methods must align with the context of the study. As researchers, we will always follow the principle of finding suitable and relevant methods, putting great care and thought into ensuring that the chosen approach will provide us with the most valuable data.

Our research question was -“What truly matters to our B2B customers in service and support?”.

Our goal, to capture their current experience of interacting with BT’s services and their expectations in depth as long-standing customer. We were looking to uncover stories of customers who faced challenges with our services in their truest essence.

Our search for more engaging methods brought us to the Love and Break-up Letters method, as outlined in “Universal Methods of Design.” Developed by Smart Design in 2009, this approach encourages participants to express their feelings toward a product or service through personal letters.

A personal letter written to a product often reveals profound insights about what people value and expect from the objects in their everyday lives.

The Love Letter delves into what people feel during their interactions and the connection they have with a product or service. Common themes include delight, infatuation, and loyalty. Researchers can learn about the initial connection and why people choose to stay with a product or service. Conversely, the Break-up Letter provides insights into how, when, and why a relationship with a product or service went wrong.

It helps us understand why people abandon a brand and what new product they are now happy with, highlighting what the new product offers that the old one did not.

This exercise is usually done in group interviews, design workshops, or as ice-breakers. Participants are asked to spend about 10 minutes writing these letters and then read them aloud. Beyond the content of the letters, this method also reveals nonverbal cues like expressions and tone of voice, providing valuable insights to share with stakeholders to build empathy towards customers.

Introducing Personal Letter Writing exercise

To adapt this method for our research, we refined the traditional interview structure. Instead of directly asking participants to write Love or Break-up letters, we framed the exercise as a personal letter to BT’s digital support service, personified as a helpful but imperfect individual striving to improve.

At the end of each interview session, participants were asked to write the letter by setting a scenario which helped them articulate their thoughts more freely and naturally, providing us with richer and more authentic insights.

In the final draft of the questionnaire, we included the following scenario:

Imagine BT support as a person who aims to work their best to support you. But they have realised that they need to improve their digital support and strive to be a better version of themselves to provide you with exceptional services.

Please write us a personal letter about what worries and scares you with digital support. Do you have apprehensions about this person? What do you like and dislike about how they try to help, support and provide a service to you? How can they provide you with services that are desirable to you?

Conducting the sessions

The success of this exercise depended heavily on careful planning and clear communication. We informed participants in advance about the letter-writing activity, ensuring they were prepared and comfortable. The interviews began with standard questions and transitioned smoothly into the letter-writing phase, maintaining an engaging and supportive atmosphere.

Asking the agency to remind the participants to keep a pen and paper handy before joining the call helped us run this exercise smoothly. Briefly reiterating this plan and confirming it with participants was another step we took from our end.

We started our usual research interview, spending the first 40 minutes on our standard questions and answers with 12 semi-structured questions.

As we neared the end, we shifted our tone and introduced the letter-writing activity as something fun — presented the scenario described in the previous section and told participants to take as much time as they needed (we usually had about 20 minutes). Participants could choose to keep their video on or off during this exercise; only one out of 12 turned their video off. With the videos we gathered non-verbal reactions as additional evidence.

As the interviewer, I kept my video on the entire time to ensure participants could easily make quick clarifications. Once they finished, participants read their letters aloud.

Our excitement surged as they started with, “Dear BT,…..”

Outcomes, learnings and reflections

Some enduring and memorable instances we had from the session were the initial reactions from participants when asked to write a personal letter. Introducing this method taught us a lot and it was a fun exercise to research a research method!

We took away some valuable learnings and outcomes:

• Customer openness: Stakeholders often think customers prefer to avoid engaging in conversations, but this mindset was clearly proven wrong. Their genuine smiles and laughter quickly validated that they enjoyed this simple, out-of-the-ordinary method and were open to exploring it with us by immersing themselves in the process.
• Clear user expectations: Typically, users want everything if given a choice, making it hard to get clear feedback. However, this time, we saw a change. Participants took their time, distilling expectations with clarity and reasoning. We believe that addressing our service as a person unlocked a wealth of insights. This method proved creative to get more out from upset customers. Writing a letter helped them organize their thoughts, allowing us to understand their true concerns and the reasons behind their feelings, rather than just their heightened emotions.
• Engaging different expressions: Interview sessions can be disappointing if users aren’t talkative or responsive. During such times, we often long for a strong cup of coffee to cope with the disappointment. However, reading their letters aloud was pivotal. It showed that everyone expresses themselves differently. Suddenly, some disengaged users became very expressive. The care and sentimentality in some of the letters revealed deep emotions toward the service, which might have been missed in verbal communication.
• Mutual appreciation: This approach wasn’t just enlightening to the team; most participants loved it too. Encouraging reflection reinforced the idea of how services enrich their lives. It was a great reminder that products and services aren’t just lines of code or pixels on a screen; they’re meant to add value to people’s lives in meaningful ways. Participants were optimistic that their active involvement would lead to innovations, which in turn would benefit them. Through such open engagements, we realise that business is essentially an exchange where our customers seek meaningful value in exchange for their monetary payments. But at the heart of this, they realise that it is a give and take. Businesses must learn this too and appreciate the value customer voices bring to the table.

Conclusion

If we confine ourselves to the digital realm and traditional UX research methods, we miss the potential for breakthroughs. By embracing unconventional methods, we unlock immense potential. Listening to our customers in new ways not only enhances our services but also builds stronger relationships. As we continue to innovate, these insights will be invaluable, guiding us to create better, more meaningful experiences for everyone involved.