INTERVIEWING USERS
HOW TO UNCOVER COMPELLING INSIGHTS
Steve Portigal
Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
By Steve Portigal
Rosenfeld Media, LLC
457 Third Street, #4R
Brooklyn, New York
11215 USA
On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com
Please send errata to: [email protected]
Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld
Managing Editor: Marta Justak
Interior Layout Tech: Danielle Foster
Cover Design: The Heads of State
Copy Editor: Kezia Endsley
Indexer: Nancy Guenther
Proofreader: Dan Foster
© 2013 Steve Portigal
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 1-933820-11-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-933820-11-8
LCCN: 2013934828
Printed and bound in the United States of America
DEDICATION
To my mom, Sharna Portigal, who taught me to ask questions.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Who Should Read This Book?
This book is for everyone who talks to customers in order to do a better job of making something for them. With this book’s guidance, you’ll be able to gather more accurate and more finely nuanced information, whether you’re a designer who brings insights into the design process, an engineer wanting to connect with how “real people” do their work, a strategist seeking a better way of identifying new opportunities, or a marketer who knows the value of data.
Even if you’ve never formally gone out to your users in order to inform your work, this book will guide you in the process of planning and executing a successful user research study. This book provides some very detailed best practices for studying people, and it encourages you to reflect on your own points of view.
And if you just like to ask questions, there’s plenty of information here for you, too!
What’s in This Book?
Chapter 1, “The Importance of Interviewing in Design,” sets the stage, looking at why you learn about users and how interviewing compares with other methods.
Chapter 2, “A Framework for Interviewing,” defines an approach—a way of being—for interviewing. All the tactical best practices emerge from this framework.
Chapter 3, “Getting Ready to Conduct Your Interviews,” describes the steps to prepare for a user research study, from identifying the problem to finding participants and preparing your questions.
Chapter 4, “More Than Just Asking Questions,” introduces a range of methods that can enhance your interviews, including artifacts you prepare and take with you, activities you ask participants to engage in, or materials you develop together with them.
Chapter 5, “Key Stages of the Interview,” describes how to manage the roles of the team in the field, as well as the different stages that most interviews go through and how to prepare for and respond to those stages.
Chapter 6, “How to Ask Questions,” gets into the details of asking questions, with positive and negative examples that illustrate how simple word choices can make a big difference.
Chapter 7, “Documenting the Interview,” reviews how to capture all the data from interviews, the limitations (and unique strengths) of taking notes, and the necessity of a proper recording.
Chapter 8, “Optimizing the Interview,” looks at common variations, typical breakdowns, and how to improve as an interviewer.
Finally, Chapter 9, “Making an Impact with Your Research,” addresses what happens next: what you do with all that data and how to take the results back to the rest of the organization.
What Comes with This Book?
This book’s companion website (
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Why is this even a book? Isn’t this really just talking to people? I already know how to do that!
To learn something new requires interviewing, not just chatting. Poor interviews produce inaccurate information that can take your business in the wrong direction. Interviewing is a skill that at times can be fundamentally different than what you do normally in conversation. Great interviewers leverage their natural style of interacting with people but make deliberate, specific choices about what to say, when to say it, how to say it, and when to say nothing. Doing this well is hard and takes years of practice.
