User Interviews, The Heart of the Design Process

A design process is essential for a design team to stay true to the people they are building for. It is how we keep ourselves honest.

If you don’t already have a process, establishing a process in an organization can be hard, not because an organization doesn’t like the idea or think it is important, but it is just hard getting people to do new things and actually change their behavior. Each organization’s process will look a little different.

I have seen some processes that are basically a list of design artifacts: wireframes, maps, mockups, personas, flows, etc., etc., etc. And though these things can be important, without the user interview, these things will become nothing more than one and zeros taking up space on your cloud storage service and pretty pictures for your online portfolio.

Whatever the process you establish, it should have two basic truths:

• The user interview — talk to real people and iterate with them
• Hold yourselves accountable to the process, keep yourselves honest

Learning from real users is exciting and the results are more naturally shared with others. This keeps real insights learned from becoming stale design artifacts that are rarely looked at again because they were produced with the purpose of design output.

Your process will not be perfect at first. With practice, patience, and humility, how you do these things will get better and you will begin to define what really works best for your team and organization.

A design process with the user interview at its heart will keep your team and product focused on solving real problems for real users.

Hope this helps, and let me know how it’s going for you.