User Interviews and Usability Testing — My Experience and Tips for Beginners

When starting a new project, you will frequently hear about conducting user interviews. User interviews are fundamental for understanding users’ requirements, behaviours, and experiences. In addition, these interviews can provide valuable insights into the user’s perspective, which is essential for designing products and services that meet the user’s needs.

Recently, I had the opportunity to work on a project where I could conduct user interviews and usability testing and I’m very excited to share my experience with you.

In this article, I will discuss the project on which I worked, the user interviews and usability testing that I conducted, the insights that I gathered, and the things that I have learned as a result of the entire exercise. I’ll also go over some key takeaways that you can use.

Background of the project

To repair or service our customers’ appliances, our service technicians travel to their homes. They recommend OneAssist protection plans to customers as a way to assist them in reducing the overall cost of future service and repair charges. We wanted to create a path for our technicians to follow that would facilitate their working quickly and effectively towards this goal.

Understanding the Business Requirements

Once I understood the project, it was time to get an overview of the business requirements. To do that, I conducted a discussion session with all the involved stakeholders where we talked about the following points:

1. Why is this journey required?
2. What is the context for which technicians will use this?
3. The scenarios where technicians would be able to see this journey.
4. Is there a similar journey available right now?
5. If yes, how is it happening?

We had a long and fruitful discussion where we discussed and resolved all the above queries. With the help of the discussion, I also got insights into the current plan selling process.

The stakeholders informed me about the technician’s current process of selling plans to customers. It covered how they check for plans and what methods they use to sell those plans to customers.

Conducting user interviews and usability testing

After understanding all of the business requirements and the stakeholders’ perspectives, the next step for me was to learn about the target audiences and their perspectives on the project that I was going to work on.

To proceed, I was looking for answers to the following questions:

1. What are the present pain points of the service technicians while selling the plans?
2. What is the easy part for them in the current process?

Therefore, I decided to interview users (in my case, service technicians) to gain insight into the current problems. In addition to conducting interviews, I decided to design some prototypes (which resembled Hi-fi designs after keeping users in mind) and conduct usability testing on those prototypes.

Preparing for the User Interviews & Usability Testing

Preparing for the user interviews and considering all the processes at once felt like a massive undertaking. So, I followed these three distinct actions:

1. Setting up a goal

The first thing I did to make sure my interviews with users went well was to write down what I wanted to learn from them. From the stakeholder interviews and our needs, I got these two clear and doable goals for the user interviews and subsequent usability testing.

2. Recruiting the users

The next step, which followed the setting of the objective, was to recruit the appropriate participants. I decided to select participants according to the amount of experience they had to obtain more insightful feedback.

The leaders of the teams of technicians provided us with assistance in shortlisting the candidates based on our criteria and inviting them to our office for the interview.

The following is some information regarding the users who were recruited:

3. Preparing the Questionaries and Scenarios

After shortlisting the user profiles, the next step was for me to prepare some interview questions.

The advantage of writing down the questions before the interviews ensures you will remember everything necessary while going through the process.

The questionnaire

I wrote down the questions I wanted to ask the technicians. Here are some of the questions:

The Scenario

I was also testing the usability, so I put together a scenario and some questions about each screen. The scenario was like this:

“You went to the user’s house to fix the air conditioner, fridge, or another appliance. Once the appliance has been fixed, you close the request. Along with that, you are suggesting a plan to the user. You saw this screen:”

Image: A sample screen presented for usability testing.

I wrote down the questions for each screen on that journey.

I made a Figma prototype and ran it on my mobile device to test its usability since technicians will use this feature on their mobile devices.

The User Interviews and Obtained Insights

I put together a team of two people to conduct the interviews. I was the interviewer, and the other person was the observer. The interviews took place at our office. We recorded the meeting and took written notes. Each interview lasted between 35 and 70 minutes.

It took a long time to understand the data gathered during the interviews.

At first, I wrote down all the raw data in a document for all the users. After that, I put the data into groups based on their similarity. Then, our team reviewed the data, and I made notes about what we could do next.

I’ve created an aggregated empathy map to share some insights from the interviews.

Based on all the insights and the target user group, here are the top takeaways:

My Takeaways from the Whole Exercise

It was a good experience, and I learned a lot from it. However, when I compared what I learned from the technician interviews and usability testing to what I learned from the initial stakeholder interviews and requirements, I found many gaps. What I saw was as follows:

1. Although stakeholders were aware of the procedure, they needed to be made aware of the difficulties technicians face or the changes they would like to see made to how things are done.
2. During usability testing, technicians discussed what they thought was missing from the screens and what they would expect to be there. For example, each of them said,

“I need to know the payment status in the app, so I don’t have to go out of my way to ask customers for payment screenshots.”

After the interviews, I used the insights I had gathered to persuade stakeholders of what should be added to the initial requirements. As a result, we cut out unnecessary details that were too much for the technicians to handle and added some features for ease.

My Final Recommendations

Based on what I’ve learned, here are a few things you should do:

1. Before beginning the interviews, be well-prepared
   Before beginning the interviews, ensure you have all the necessary materials for the session.
   
   “I didn’t get the Hindi language screens ready for usability testing. But during the exercise, I realised it could have added more value to the insights.”
2. Make the conversations
   Someone said in an article, “Don’t do interviews; talk to the users.”
   It was incredibly beneficial to me. When you talk to users instead of just asking them questions, they feel more comfortable and share more information with you.
3. Take notes of every single detail
   It is essential to take notes on everything. Something that seems unimportant during the interview may be valuable in the future.
4. Document the insights right after the interview
   It is best to record everything while it is still fresh in your mind. You might miss some critical details if you wait a few days to do the paperwork.

Thanks for reading…😊