is a deliberate, learned specialty that goes beyond what happens in everyday conversation. For you as an interviewer, it’s the same thing.
The Impact of Interviewing
Interviewing creates a shared experience, often a galvanizing one, for the product development team (which can include researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product management, and beyond). In addition to the information we learn from people and the inspiration we gain from meeting them, there’s a whole other set of transformations we go through. You might call it empathy—say a more specific understanding of the experience and emotions of the customer—which might even be as simple as seeing “the user” or “the customer” as a real live person in all their glorious complexity. But what happens when people develop empathy for a series of individuals they might meet in interviews? They experience an increase in their overall capacity for empathy.1
This evolution in how individual team members view themselves, their design work, and the world around them starts to drive shifts in the organizational culture (see Figure 1.6). This capacity for empathy is not sufficient to change a culture, but it is necessary.
More tactically, these enlightened folks are better advocates for customers and better champions for the findings and implications of what has been learned in interviews.
The wonderful thing about these impacts is that they come for free (or nearly). Being deliberate in your efforts to interview users will pay tremendous dividends for your products, as well as the people who produce it.
FIGURE 1.6 Team experiences that are challenging and out-of-the-ordinary create goodwill and a common sense of purpose.
Summary
It’s become increasingly common, perhaps even required, for companies to include user research in their design and development process. Among many different approaches to user research, interviewing (by whatever name you want to call it) is a deep dive into the lives of customers.
• Interviewing can be used in combination with other techniques, such as identifying key themes through interviews and then validating them quantitatively in a subsequent study.
• At a distance, interviewing looks just like the everyday act of talking to people, but interviewing well is a real skill that takes work to develop.
• Interviewing can reveal new “frames” or models that flip the problem on its head. These new ways of looking at the problem are crucial to identifying new, innovative opportunities.
• Interviewing can be used to help identify what could be designed, to help refine hypotheses about a possible solution that is being considered, or to guide the redesign of an existing product that is already in the marketplace
• Teams who share the experience of meeting their users are enlightened, aligned, and more empathetic.
CHAPTER 2
A Framework for Interviewing
Check Your Worldview at the Door
Embrace How Other People See the World
When Wayne Gretzky apocryphally1 explained his hockey success as “I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be,” he identified a key characteristic of many experts: the underlying framework that drives everything. This platonically idealized Gretzky could have revealed any number of tactics such as his grip, or the way he shifts his weight when he skates. Keith Richards explains his guitar sound, which involves removing the 6th string, tuning to open G, and using a particular fretting pattern, as “five strings, three notes, two fingers, and one asshole.” Even though Keith is explaining the tactics, he’s also revealing something ineffable about where he’s coming from. The higher-level operating principles that drive these experts are compelling and illustrative.
Expert researchers also have their own operating principles. In this chapter, I’ll outline mine, and I hope to inspire you to develop your own interviewing framework. As you develop, the process evolves from a toolkit for asking questions into a way of being, and you’ll find that many of the tactical problems to solve in interviewing are simply no-brainers. As George Clinton sang, “Free your mind...and your ass will follow.”
Check Your Worldview at the Door
I’ve been asked, “What was the most surprising thing you ever learned while doing fieldwork?” I scratch my head over that one because I don’t go out into the field with a very strong point of view. Of course, I’m informed by my own experiences, my suspicions, and what my clients have told me, but I approach the interviews with a sense of what I can only call a bland curiosity.
As the researcher, it’s my responsibility to find out what’s going on; I’m not invested in a particular outcome. Even more (and this is where the blandness comes from), I’m not fully invested in a specific set of answers. Sure, we’ve got specific things we want to learn—questions we have to answer in order to fulfill our brief. But my hunger to learn from my participant is broad, not specific. I’m curious, but I don’t know yet what I’m curious about. My own expectations are muted, blunted, and distributed. Although I will absolutely find the information I’m tasked with uncovering, I also bring a general curiosity. Now, the people I work with don’t have the luxury of bland curiosity. Whether they are marketers, product managers, engineers, or designers (or even other researchers), they often have their own beliefs about what is going on with people. This makes sense: if there’s enough organizational momentum to convene a research project, someone has been thinking hard about the issues and the opportunities, and has come to a point of view.
The Brain Dump
At the beginning of the project, convene a brain dump (see Figure 2.1). Get what’s in everyone’s heads out on the table. Whether it’s real-time, face-to-face, in front of a whiteboard, or asynchronously across offices on a wiki, talk through assumptions, expectations, closely-held beliefs, perspectives, and hypotheses. Contradictions are inevitable and should even be encouraged. The point is not establishing consensus; it’s to surface what’s implicit. By saying it aloud and writing it
