The First Step in a Real Dang Good User Interview
Are you the designer who people can trust?
As an investigative user researcher, part of my job is to step into another person’s shoes to get an idea of how they see the world and what is it that motivates them. Are they drawn to certain qualities or people? Are they steadfast about their priorities or are they more fluid about things they find important? How do they fit into their communities? Do they like the way they fit in or do they dislike it?
Importantly, how do they see other people and how do they communicate with others?
Even more importantly, and urgently because I’ve just sat down with them in their home or over Zoom and am about to start asking them all of these questions:
How do they see me? Am I the type of person that they can say all of those things to?
There is a misconception that building empathy with someone takes time and is this slow, undulating, process. It can certainly feel that way as you are helping someone feel comfortable before getting them to dig deep down into the details of their psyche. But really, a researchers ability to empathize starts sooner than that. Much, much, sooner.
A user researcher’s empathy must start from before they say hello. Right at the very first impression. An interviewer is never a blank slate and people will see the interviewer in a certain way, which will then influence what they say. I think people from marginalized groups know this feeling viscerally from their day to day interactions. I think this is a feeling that many interviewers forget about when doing research.
Here is a personal example from a little while back:
Full disclosure, I am white, male, and have a very clearly slavic name. Usually by the time I am interviewing someone, they are aware that I work as a designer and that I am somehow involved with some universities. I am 30-something, but people tend to guess that I am younger. I can’t help that, that is objectively the first impression. What is important though is the subtext my impression evokes in others. Because it changes what they tell me.
I was interviewing a woman-of-a-certain age, who is a public official, about how public workers throughout the state are facing huge interpersonal challenges. Basically, this group of public workers were having a tough time connecting with others especially as more complex discussions about race, gender, inclusion, are becoming necessary. People were feeling out of their depth and would disengage and become defensive when dealing with hard topics. The woman I was interviewing had first hand experience with this and had been working to fix this situation, state-wide, for a while.
The best way I can describe the interview is polite. Although I was hearing a lot of important details, I couldn’t help but feel that there was more than what she was letting on. It felt too simple and pedantic.
At one point the woman mentions kids. Nothing more, but just casually said it offhandedly. My interview partner then turns to me and says “Oh! You have a 9 year old right?”
“Wait. What?”
That one phrase immediately changed the interview. I didn’t change but the woman saw me differently. For the record, I said in the interview about how I don’t have a 9 year old son, but rather a 9 year old brother that I take care of.
The relationship between us changed and she began to speak about challenges engaging with kids, being there for people with severe depression, and how that affects the mental health of the workers who did not fully realize how much of their jobs is going to involve doing that. That was the thing that was causing dissociation and disengagement. Then when they were put into meeting rooms to discuss systemic racism in the workplace when they weren’t busy, they were already coming in from a low, negative, place. There was a shift in tone of the interview as it seemed like a big veil was lifted.
In thinking about what the big difference was that changed the nature of the interview, I could only come up with that moment. The theory here is that in the first half of the interview, the woman saw me as a young boy who needed things to be explained to him. In the second half, she saw me as an adult who took care of others and could speak to me with the nuance that I surely must have understood.
What I learned that day changed my approach to user research. Now I try to start seeing the world through another’s eyes as soon as I meet them. It is not a slow burn into empathy. It is a fast plunge which then only becomes more colorful as I spend more time with them.
The first step in a real dang good interview is
turning on all of the focus and connection you can to immediately look at the world through their eyes. Are you the type of person who they think can understand them?
My colleague was standing above an open mine shaft, where gritty Southeast Asian miners dug for gem stones.
She was trying to understand what keeps them motivated, deep underground, where paydays are few and far between. The problem is that nobody was real with her. She is a Southeast Asian woman educated in America who, in a world of social class structure, is in the wrong place at the wrong time. At the top of the gem stone mine, people were polite and she would be getting no information.
Later, at night, she pulls up to the home of one of the miners where she is greeted by him and his family. This time she comes by motorcycle. She also brushed up on her slang.
“How are you such a boy?”
The miner saw her differently and that evening he was real with her.
People need to trust you before they tell you what is real for them. Are you someone who can meet their need?
