Books to Get Your Customer Interviewing Practice Up and Running
After my workshops on Customer Interviewing I’m often asked which books I would recommend for further reading. I always advocate practice as the best way to improve — but these should help you get up and running if you’ve not tried interviewing before.
Getting started
There are two short (free!) mini-books on interviewing practice that give a good overview of the basics.
Interviewing for Research by Andrew Travers
This was written for a user experience audience and will give you a good introduction. It’s great for UX folk new to interviewing.
Talking to Humans by Giff Constable
Giff targets his book more to the entrepreneur / startup person but there are tools and tactics that are useful to everybody. You can get free epub and pdf versions from talkingtohumans.com and there’s a £0.99p Kindle version.
Digging in
These books give more in depth coverage and help you to refine your interviewing methods.
Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal
This is an excellent general introduction to interviewing practices for a UX audience, although it’s an easy read for people without that background too.
Practical Empathy by Indi Young
This gives another perspective on interviewing practice. Indi is focused more on using interviews to gain cognitive empathy with your customers. It’s an excellent companion to her Mental Models book.
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
This is written to non-UX people (entrepreneur / startup folk), and more from the solution-interview end of the interviewing spectrum. It doesn’t really give enough emphasis to the generative value of interviewing, but has some nice tips on note-taking.
(Yes, I hate the title too. At least it’s not talking about the dumb and harmful “so easy my mom can use it” stereotype. It’s trying to talk about the problems of getting unbiased information from people who might consciously or unconsciously be trying to keep you happy.)
If you’re really keen
There’s some excellent advice in the following books, but they’re writing to an academic audience in the social sciences. There are things to learn from them, but you’re going to need to put in more effort to figure out how to apply that learning to an industry context.
Interviewing As Qualitative Research by Irving Seidman
The Ethnographic Interview by James P. Spradley
Learning From Strangers by Robert Weiss
InterViews by Steinar Kvale & Svend Brinkmann
Are there any other books you’ve found useful in getting your customer interviewing practice up and running? Let me know — I’d welcome any suggestions!
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