How We Learn From Interviews

As part of this User Experience project, we spend a lot of time talking to people about how they interact with HydroShare and hydrology data. It’s important, with all of this user data, to have a framework for capturing all of this data so that we can learn from it later. So what exactly do we do after an interview? There are a few steps.

As soon as the interview is over, we produce two artifacts. The first is a process retrospective. This involves us writing down what went well and what did not go well during the interview. For example, sometimes we have questions that weren’t useful or questions that we missed. We like to take note of this for next time. The second is a people portrait. A people portrait is a poster with all of the important information from a user interview. Each of the portraits contains a pseudonym for the user (we’ve been using natural phenomena to name our users — Avalanche, Landslide, Flash Flood, Red Tide) as well as a picture, which is usually not super accurate.

After we have done a bunch of user interviews, some themes will start emerging. These themes might include “I hate this button” or “I have a fundamental issue with this entire concept.” We like to capture these with other design frameworks. Some common ones are personas (which are general people portraits for people who don’t exist and represent a “general” user of a certain type), 2x2s (which are graphs that have axis that represent opposing principles — for example, community vs solidarity), and Venn diagrams. These will help us decide what kinds of things to prototype.

The final part of our design process is to prototype and test those prototypes with users to see how well we’re addressing their pain points. As we learn more about how well the prototypes are addressing user pain points, we’ll develop the prototypes further and keep iterating.

After enough iteration, we should converge on a final product!