(Nearly) Instant Research: 4 Tips for Remote Live Intercept Interviews
Ever wish you could know what users are thinking as they’re browsing your website? Not representative users recruited from your desired audience, but the actual visitors to your website?
Whenever I’m crunching numbers from Google Analytics, especially the dreaded bounce and exit rates, I fantasize about asking representatives of those nameless, faceless thousands of users why they left the website. Just as the site visitor is about to leave, I’d materialize at their shoulder like the Ghost of UX Present and cry, “No, please! Don’t go. Tell me why! Why do you want to leave this page? What did we do wrong?”
Therein lies the magic of a remote live intercept. You really can catch people on your website and, if you plan right, ask them about their impressions before their memories have had time to fade. (While it’s less dramatic that being the Ghost of UX Past, no ectoplasmic capabilities are required. Usually just some basic Google Tag Manager skills.)
At Marketade, we typically use Ethnio to set up a live intercept pop-up on a website, often a specific page or set of pages. We use that pop-up to ask site visitors if they’d be willing to talk with us. We’re intercepting them in real time. As Marieke McCloskey of the Nielsen Norman Group noted, the advantage here is twofold: “This ensured that [recruited users] were: 1) interested in the information on our website, and 2) actual users of our website.”
This type of research can be touchy, so here are a few tips that I’ve gleaned from my wonderful coworkers and my own experience.
1. Keep your intercept pop-up messaging and screener as short and direct as possible.
You can place a pop-up on a website… but can you get visitors to participate? That’s the first big hurdle of remote live intercept recruiting.
My colleague Sonya Badigian did some clever tinkering and experimentation with live intercepts and noticed how small tweaks changed the amount of leads she received. She found that the simpler the language on the intercept pop-up, the better. Ask if they’re interested in giving feedback. Get their name and their phone number. That’s about it.
More surprisingly, Sonya received more leads when she didn’t mention that the research came with an incentive. Pretty counterintuitive, right? While this may not apply to all websites and situations, we inferred that seeing a dollar amount made the pop-up seem suspicious, like it was trying to bribe the visitor into doing something fishy.
A clean, concise invitation to provide input on a website is, in our experience, the most effective approach for recruiting interviewees.
2. Call participants ASAP, and be ready to conduct an interview right then and there.
The whole point of live intercept recruiting is that, as Victor Yocco noted in Smashing Magazine, “[t]he context of the task is top of mind.” You want to strike while the iron is hot and obtain fresh, unfiltered feedback. Block off a few hours when you can monitor the live intercept pop-up responses and contact a user without delaying.
“Hop on a call” has become a cliché, but you do want to be quick like a bunny here, and hop on that call. Even if the user tells you that now’s not a good time, you’ve made the connection, fixed the experience in their mind, and laid the groundwork to call back later.
At Marketade, we’re accustomed to calling people to screen them before UX sessions, but the screening call, crucial though it is, requires less preparation than the session itself. By contrast, in live intercept recruiting, “the key difference is that you will try to keep the user on the phone and extend the screening call into a full session if the user is a good fit,” in the words of my colleague Karishma Patel.
You need to have everything set up to go and be prepared to record in case the user is qualified and willing.
3. Use Google Voice to call participants from your computer and Camtasia (or another screen-recording software) to capture the session.
If you’re going through all the trouble to conduct these interviews, you’ll want to document them. You might find it tricky to record well if you call from a phone. But if you make a Google Voice call from your computer, then you can use any decent screen-recording tool that also captures audio to record your session.
4. Ask the user to pull up the website. Make sure you’re looking at the same page(s) as the participant, at least as a starting point.
In most UX interviews, I ask the participant to share their screen in Zoom or GoToMeeting so I can watch what they’re doing. Given the catch-as-catch-can nature of live intercept interviews, conducted over the phone, I don’t have that luxury. Instead, I ask the interviewee to go to their computer or device and pull up the page where they were intercepted. “Go to your browser and type in…” And I’ll give them the exact address. Or I might text it to them if it’s too long to type.
“Do you remember seeing this page?” I’ll ask. And from there I’ll work backward. How did the participant land on the website in the first place? Had they been there before? What were they looking for? Had they recently looked at similar websites?
Then I’ll ask about the experience on the website. What were the user’s first impressions? What did they like or dislike? What was the path that took them to the page where they were intercepted?
And this is where being literally on the same page as the interviewee is essential. If they say they didn’t see the button or found the menu confusing or didn’t like the picture in the upper left corner, I want to be certain that I know what they’re talking about. I’ll ask probing questions as necessary to get clarity on what they’re seeing and make sure that my understanding aligns with theirs. If they navigate to a different page, I’ll follow, confirming as I go that we’re looking at the same thing.
In addition to helping me get oriented, asking the user to look at and describe the pages often jogs their memory and encourages them to give specifics on what delighted and/or frustrated them.
And, if appropriate, I’ll ask what the user did after they exited the website. Where did they go next? Did they continue their search for something in particular? Did they plan to return to your website?
Conducting UX interviews with participants recruited from a remote live intercept can be challenging. You might have to put a hold in your calendar and prepare carefully. The pace may feel frenetic and a little haphazard. But the rewards of hearing from users who recently visited the target website are, in my experience, worth the extra effort.
