User
INterviews
Time
⏲
7+ Days
Difficulty
🕹
Hard
Materials
📦
Recording equipment
Spreadsheet to track responses
People
🕴
2 Reserachers
5+ Users
Overview
Observation is critical, but to really know the user’s experience, you have to ask him or her about it, and that’s an interview. This type of interviewing is formal and standardized, and as a kind of *nondirected* interview, tries to minimize the perspective of the person asking the questions.
Interview Structure
Introduction
All participants introduce themselves. In groups it’s important to emphasize similarities between all the participants, including the interviewer. In an individual interview, introduction establishes the role of the interviewer as a neutral, but sympathetic, entity.
Warm-up
The warm-up in any interview is designed to get people to step away from their regular lives and focus on thinking about the product and the work of answering questions.
General issues
The initial product-specific round of questions concentrates on experiences with the product, as well as attitudes, expectations, and assumptions about it. Asking these kinds of questions early prevents the assumptions of the product development team from skewing people’s perceptions. Often, the product isn’t even named during this phase.
Deep focus
The product, service, or idea is introduced, and people concentrate on the details of what it does, how it works, whether they can use it, and what their immediate experience of it is. For usability testing, this phase makes up the bulk of the interview, but for site visits or exploratory interviews, it may never enter the discussion.
Retrospective
This phase allows people to evaluate the product or idea in a broader light. The discussion is comparable to the “general issues” phase, but the discussion is focused on how the ideas introduced in the “deep focus” phase affect the issues discussed earlier.
Wrap-up
This is generally the shortest phase of the interview. It formally completes the interview so that the participants aren’t left hanging after the last question and returns to administrative topics.
Nondirected Interviewing
is the process of conducting interviews that do not lead or bias the answers. It minimizes the effects of the interviewer’s preconceptions in order to explore the user’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
The Neutral Interviewer
Asking questions so as not to bias the respondent’s answer involves a lot of self-imposed distance and a rigorously critical examination of your assumptions. This can be especially difficult when you are intimately familiar or emotionally invested in the product. At first it’s going to feel like your questions take too much energy to formulate and sound stilted. Experience will clarify which questions lead people and how to phrase questions neutrally. Eventually, when you’ve achieved nondirected question enlightenment, your questions will sound natural, analysis will be easier, and the unbiased answers you get will give you greater confidence in your results.
Asking nondirected questions has been called an art of “talking without really saying anything.” **Interviewers need to encourage people to talk without telling them what to say.** Often, that means keeping quiet and letting the participant think. Experienced interviewers also have a repertoire of generic conversational cues. Some of them are nonverbal, such as “uh-huh” and “mm-hm.” Others are sympathetic but bland, such as “that’s interesting” and “oh, really.” Others, such as “Can you tell me more about ____?” ask for more detail, but don’t specify a correct answer. Whether verbally or nonverbally, it’s important to make sure people know you are paying attention to them.
Composing Nondirected Questions
Every question should focus on the person answering it
It should focus on *experience*, not extrapolation. Our understanding of our own behavior rarely corresponds to how we really behave. When we try to put ourselves in others’ shoes, we idealize and simplify. That’s useful in trying to understand people’s ideals, but it’s rarely useful in understanding their behavior.
Instead of “Is this a useful feature?”
Ask “Is this feature valuable to the work you do right now?”
Questions should concentrate on immediate experience
People’s current behavior better predicts their future behavior than do their predictions.
Instead of “Is this interesting to you?”
Ask “If it were available today, would you use it? Why?”
Questions should avoid judgmental language
The person answering the question shouldn’t think that you’re expecting a specific answer or that any answer is wrong.
Instead of “Don’t you think that this would be better if it was also available on smart phones?”
Ask “Is there any other way you would use a feature like this?”
Focus questions on a single topic
An “and” or an “or” linking two ideas is ambiguous. It’s hard to tell which concept the response addresses.
Instead of “How would this product be useful to you in school or at work?” Ask “How would this product be useful to you at school?” and “How would this product be useful to you at work?”
Keep questions open-ended
If forced to choose, people will pick something, even if none of the options match what they believe.
Instead of “Which feature from the following list is most important to you?” Ask “Rate from 1 to 5 how important each of the following features is to you, where 1 is least important and 5 is most important. Put 0 if a feature is completely unimportant. Write down any features we may have missed.”
Or, instead of rating, ask “Does the product do anything that’s particularly useful to you? If so, what is it? What makes it useful?”
Avoid binary questions
Binary questions are of the form “yes/no” or “true/false” or “this/that,” and they force people to make a black-and-white choice when their attitude may not lie near either extreme.
Instead of “Is this a good product?” Ask “What, if anything, do you like about this product?”
Resources
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Tools
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