Know Thy User: The Seven Research Commandments

Learn how to turn user interviews into a meaningful conversation. First up: Study pain.

Yes, people drink coffee to stay awake. This in no way explains the multitude of deeper meanings which „Let’s have a cup of coffee“ can bear in various settings. Is it a pickup line? Is it a way to start the day? Or to have a break from it? Is it a cure for home-sickness? Could it be the invitation to an informal business meeting?

This is an ongoing series in which I revisit critical moments in my time as Head of Marketing at Vimcar. Today, we pick up the story after our recently formed team had decided to follow a niche-idea all the way to the bottom, going against all business logic. Glad you’re here!

Below is a list of seven items for you that will turn any user research phase into an insightful, intrepid journey. Before we start, however, we need to get this one, most important principle set in stone, first:

Be emotional, not functional.

To the point: figure out why people really have coffee. What’s the emotional subtext behind the functional guise?

In other words: Avoid exploring how your target gets a certain task done. Instead, find out how they feel about it. Listen closely how this mundane part of their daily grind fits into the bigger picture of their way of being a human being, into their personalities. What other elements is this one task connected to, who are its stakeholders? What is its real purpose? Where and when does it matter?

For Vimcar, if we had asked drivers how they tracked their business mileage, we would have received perfectly acceptable descriptions of people getting a certain job done. Only when we started asking how they felt about this task did we begin to understand. For this dry and boring task, participants had rich, deep emotions. When we pushed further afield, exploring the peculiar community of fleet managers, leasing-company salesmen and tax advisors, they all related to the one job of documenting business driving in one way or another — and shared more feelings about it.

It turned out people were furious about trip-logging, they felt tormented by it. Not few were obsessed with the task, adamant to master it, despite the difficulty of the process in its analogue form. We had discovered an incredible pain point and in its trail of peskiness an eco-system of jobs to be done. Yes, the problem we had discovered was lame. This was precisely why no-one had ever shown up to solve it. It was this very lameness that drove users nuts. We built a company around it.

Here are seven rules for your personal horror-trip into any users’ deepest agonies:

1. Bring time to spare: Allow for at least 60 minutes when setting up an interview session. Tell your interviewee that you will require his time for twenty or so minutes. You will only have done your job well, however, if you really get her or him talking. Having to cut the conversation short because you have another call scheduled too closely is poison. And remember: The most important stuff will be learned once you have officially ended the questions-part. Trust me on this. Just stick around for a little longer.
2. Trust: User research will always feel like a covert mission: Of course, your interviewee should have a basic idea of what you are working on. Disclosing the precise interest behind your questions, however, will most probably stall your search for the one thing you are looking for: Honesty. And what a ridiculous quest it is! The whole point of the journey you are on is learning, which means that you will need to leave your comfort zone and talk to strangers. Gaining their trust is the most essential task of the interviewer. Speak slowly, introduce yourself and the company you work for briefly, make sure to stress how grateful you are for your interviewee’s time: Tell her that she is special and how difficult it is to track down individuals like her and that by agreeing to the interview, she will significantly help out a few young hot shots chasing a dream. Play down the size of the business if there is any and share your bootstrapping-story if you can. Lastly, assure your opposite that all her information will be kept entirely anonymous.
3. More trust: Most importantly, however: Get introduced. Use the law of weak ties and search within your personal network for people who can make intros to relevant users. In most cases, these second-degree targets will be polite enough to agree to an interview-request but won’t add bias by saying stuff you may want to hear.
4. Trust, one last time: Gain trust by chatting away. Don’t steal your interview partner’s time, but use every opportunity to show respect and genuine interest. Do so by asking a bunch of questions that feel non-invasive, inconspicuous and easy to reply to. Use this time to check for basic parameters in order to build empathetic, yet comparable profiles. Ask about media usage habits and education background, choice of device and favourite brands. All this information will help you puzzle together personas later on. Devote at least a third on these warm-up and peripheral questions.
5. Ask, and ask again: Be careful not to keep nodding along or to wander off to the next question at the back of your mind: Listen intently and make sure you are presented with honest, off-the-cuff opinion and attitude, not platitudes and general truths. Personally, whenever I get plain rhetorics and turns of phrases as responses, I will hear my interviewee out and then ask the same question again, saying something along the lines of: „Ok, but how do you personally feel about this?“
   Pro-tip: Make sure to clarify industry slang early in the process. Little is more embarrassing than „uhu-uhu“-ing along and having to divulge later that you actually had no clue what the person on the other end was talking about. It’s fine, they are the experts, there are no stupid questions.
6. Be patient. What may seem irrelevant at the moment could help paint a more complete picture later on. Yes, those tangents are painful, but appreciating the entire story of that guppy-pond your interview-partner built in his back yard last year will build rapport. Make notes along the entire interview and use them as quotes to get your conversation back on track later on.
7. Get personal. You found out about the basic livelihood parameters of the person in front of you. You understand their profession, you learned where they live, if they have kids, what car they drive, what they like to do on Sundays. You then proceeded to your actual field of research and found out about their attitudes towards your potential product. Now, if you want to win this game, tackle the boss of all user research interview questions: Ask about hopes and dreams. Understanding your potential users’ fears and anxieties, exploring what drives them and what holds them back in life, gently pushing to see behind the façade will put everything you learned previously in a larger perspective. This extremely sensitive information will be the key to predicting attitudes towards the way you position your brand and product in the market later on. It will give you the ability to actually know your users. At Vimcar, we even went so far as to ask interviewees for pictures of their kitchens and living rooms, adding extremely valuable context to the social-economic parameters and personal stories we got to hear over the course of our interiews. Sorry, I know, this one is really hard to do.

Hooray, you made it to the end.

Why is this article so damn long? And why are these interviews supposed to be so damn deep? You’re not a shrink, you want to build a great product, for the love of god! Where does it all end?

First of all: It never will. If you want to build a product that people actually give a toss about, get used to the idea of building an intimate relationship with your users first — and then to not just sustain but develop it, just like any friendship or love-affair. In other words: If you want your users to have a meaningful relationship to you and your service, be prepared to heavily invest in this relationship by getting to know them in earnest.

The whole point of asking beyond the functional is this: Yes, products solve a specific problem. Successful products, powerful brands and influential companies, however, do more than that: They offer a story which recognises users as human beings. In turn, these users will happily incorporate this story into their lives — and make it part of their own, share it, remix it, hate it, love it, bottom line: have feelings for it.

To get there, start listening intently.

In case you were wondering: Yes, Vimcar’s initial user research phase really was worth the pain, in fact it paid out more than once. We kept in touch with interviewees and asked them back for early tests of click-dummies and MVPs. Later on, these very first contacts populated our private beta. By keeping these relationships alive, we slowly had formed a loyal testing community which was happy to point out the million kinks our early versions suffered from.

More on that: In my next post. Have a good week!

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