Tips on Observing and Interviewing People

Empathizing with your target audience is a key success factor. Here are some tips to get the most out of your field trip.

Entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel wrote in „Zero to One“ that one of the key success factors of a startup is to identify a unique opportunity that others don’t see (a secret).

“Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see.”

To reveal secrets about people you have to dig very deep because those secrets „are things that people don’t know about themselves or things they hide because they don’t want others to know“. The best way to find those secrets is to develop a deep understanding of your target audience (empathy) through observing and interviewing them.

Secrets are, by nature, hard to find. To reveal them it takes practice and good preparation. I like to share a couple of tips that might help you to find those secrets.

Un-bias yourself

I often read you need to have a ‚beginner’s mindset‘ to do good field research. Often people take this very easy and just try to be more open-minded. Well, that’s not enough! We’re all biased and see the world through filters. We need to remove these filters before we can see what is really going on.

Removing those filters is not easy and will never work 100 % (maybe if you are a Zen Buddhist).

• If you’re using the product or service, stop using it.
• Find other observers and figure out what they see. Good observers are often people from outside of the circle (e.g. expats) or people with contact to lots of different people in the community (e.g. hairdresser, church, sports club). Talk to them or, look what they post on social media.
• Gather as many different perspectives from as many trustworthy sources as possible.

Prepare a field-guide

• Creating hypotheses and articulate topics of interest with research questions and assumptions about current behavior.
• Prepare a series of set questions, but try not to use them.
• Choose people you can observe in their actual environment. You don’t want a retrospective from the people, you want the behavior live in action because our memory is biased and error prone.
• Look for different people in different contexts. People with extraordinary views or attitudes. Provocative frames help to see the world in a new way.
• You shouldn’t go on a field trip with more than three people: the interviewer, the note-taker, and the photographer.

Observing

• Record as much as possible and collect artifacts, but make sure you communicate in advance how the data is used and when it’s deleted. Ask for permission very politely.
• Observation relies on quality, not quantity. Be aware that all the things we own, like, and buy, tell a lot about who we are. This is our idealized self. This is how we’d like others to see us. This is how we’d like to see ourselves.
• Figure out how people want to be perceived by the rest of the world. Ask e.g. what evokes the strongest emotions, what is their favorite piece of clothing, or what is most important in their life?
• Look for conflicts between ‚idealized self‘ and ‚real self‘ (this is where you find most secrets). You can observe the real self in people’s behavior (not in what they tell you) and in places that are not made for public eyes (e.g. refrigerators, wardrobes, garages, browser bookmarks).
• Use an observation framework like WHW (What, How, Why) or AEIOU (Action, Environment, Interaction, Object, User) for note-taking. If you recorded the observation, you can review the recording several times for each aspect.
• Dig deeper. Ask to see an example. Ask if you can try it yourself. Ask ‚what if …‘ to learn about different scenarios.

Interviewing

• Have a prepared set of open-end, broad questions. Don’t ask about opinions and statistics. Ask about actions, workflows and processes.
• Ask questions that provoke behavior („Can you show me how …“).
• Develop an interview guideline: open specific to warm up the participant (questions they are comfortable with). Then go broad to prompt bigger thinging. Then probe deeper with „what if“-scenarios. Scenario-based questions are less abstract and lead to more accurate answers.
• If you have to talk about memories, then always set a time-frame (e.g. last 2 weeks) or ask for the last time a behavior happened. This is more specific and leads to more accurate answers.
• Ask why, followed by how (WHY-HOW-Laddering), and repeat.

Good luck with your next research project! If you have other tips, please share them in the comments.

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