When I really learned how to write discussion guides
Day 24 of the UX Designer Bootcamp with General Assembly. I’ve figured it out, how to write a good discussion guide.
We’re in Project 3, I’ve written my 3rd ever discussion guide with my project team and conducted several user interviews. As it is all processing in my head, I realise it is quite evident there are things that as a UX designer are ‘in my control’ and a lot that are ‘out of’ my control . And being a bit of a control freak, I realised this is something I better pay attention to!
I suddenly realised the importance of identifying these, lets call them ‘obstacles’, and that it was important to understand from my interviewees not just what these obstacles were for them, but their behaviours around them. I figured, we can’t move the obstacles, but how can we as ux-designers change the behaviours of our users to get around them?
This might seem quite obvious to the every day designer, but for me on my 3rd project, and 1st time conducting real user interviews (i.e. with people outside of my personal network), it was a real light bulb moment!
We had to hit the ground running on this project to achieve deliverables within a short timeframe, which meant we jumped straight into user interviews without much prior research. Next time though, I will take the time to better understand the subject, research who is doing it well, what research already exists, what ‘obstacles’ exist, identify assumptions, and set myself up so I can dive deeper beyond!
