What’s Your (UX Design) Superpower?
Each one of us, at one time or another, has dreamed of being a superhero or wished for a superpower. As a kid I wanted to be Iron Man. Who wouldn't want that cool suit with all of that technology at your fingertips? But if you had a choice of user experience superpowers, what would you choose?
And in the world of user experience design methods and approaches we have an abundance of choices. According to Vijay Kumar, there are at least 101 Design Methods including: in-context visits, card sorts, map building, shadowing, cultural probes, intercepts, and many more.
Step Back
Before we get too excited perhaps we should step back a bit and understand—what are we really trying to achieve? Why do we need user experience superpowers anyway?
Any serious attempt to state “what our business is” must start with the customers’ realities… The customer defines the business. —Peter Drucker
So the core principle at work is that we must understand our customers. What does the world look like to them? What’s their mental model of how things work? What are key insights that we can understand about our customers that will help us build a business?
Interviewing Users is a Superpower?
You have your choice of any UX superpower and you choose Interviewing Users? Are you kidding me? I kid you not. My choice would be the superpower of Interviewing Users—sounds mundane, but in the hands of the right practitioner, can be quite magical.
First let me set some context for where interviewing users, as a form of research, makes sense. I’m not talking about traditional market research approaches which tend to be evaluative in nature—statistically based, definitive, and convergent. I am saying that interviewing users can be invaluable as part of qualitative, user-centered research—ethnographic based, ambiguous, and divergent.
Good Interviews Provide Context
What do we get out of good interviews? We get rich, in-context data on customer activities from a first-person point of view. We get thorough data on customers’ real experiences. We get unique insights that lead to generative and actionable design principles, the basis for understanding what opportunities we should pursue and why.
Top 7 Interviewing Tips
Tip 1: Internalize the protocol.
Tip 2: Don’t ask leading questions.
Tip 3: Ask questions using the person’s own words.
Tip 4: Allow for discomfort.
Tip 5: Listen actively (quietly.)
Tip 6: Never correct your subject
Tip 7: Follow up immediately after each interview.
Final Thoughts
Interviewing Users enables me to stay curious, learn from my interactions, and discover cool new stuff. I may not be Iron Man, but with my superpower of Interviewing Users, I’m feeling quite powerful…
