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FIGURE 2.1 Capture everything that everyone thinks they know so that it’s not stuck in their heads.
It’s also not about being right or wrong; I encourage you to anonymize all the input so that people don’t feel sheepish about expressing themselves. I wouldn’t even go back and validate the brain dump against the resulting data. The objective is to shake up what is in your mind and free you to see new things. Think about it as a transitional ritual of unburdening, like men emptying their pockets of keys, change, and wallet as soon as they return home (Figure 2.2).
FIGURE 2.2 Transitional rituals are actions we take to remind ourselves that we are shifting from one mode of being to another.
TIP WORK IT OUT
Chicago’s DD+D (who bill themselves as “a theater-based design team”) offers a Design Empathy workshop. Using improv and other theater techniques, this workshop “helps designers to check in and acknowledge their own biases and to explore assumptions before going out and doing research.”2
Make the Interview About the Interview
Another transitional ritual is to make a small declaration to yourself and your fellow fieldworkers in the moments before you begin an interview. If you are outside someone’s apartment or entering their workspace, turn to each other and state what you are there to accomplish. If you were in a movie, you’d probably growl purposefully “Let’s do this thing.” Sadly, fieldwork is not quite that glamorous, so you might want to clarify what you mean by “this thing.” Remember, even if you consider the fieldwork part of a larger corporate initiative to “identify next-gen opportunities for Q3 roadmap,” that’s not where you should be focusing as you start your interview. Set aside the underlying goals for the duration of the session. “This thing” might instead be learning about Paul and how he uses his smartphone or GlobeCorp’s IT department and how they deploy new routers. It’s important to take that moment to tangibly confirm—and affirm—your immediate objective.
Embrace How Other People See the World
If you’ve effectively purged yourself of your own worldview, you are now a hollow vessel waiting to be filled with insights. Lovely image, isn’t it? It’s not quite accurate. You need to not only be ready to hear your participant’s take on things, but you should also be hungry for it. This willingness to embrace is an active, deliberate state.
Go Where the People Are
Rather than asking people to come to you to be interviewed, go where they are. In order to embrace their world, you have to be in their world. Inviting them into your realm (and let’s face it, even if a neutral market research facility isn’t technically your realm, that’s how your participants will perceive it) won’t cut it. You’ll benefit by interviewing them in their own environment—this is the environment you are interested in, where the artifacts and behaviors you want to learn about are rooted. By the same token, you’ll also benefit from your own first-hand experience in that environment. The information you learn when going into other people’s worlds is different from what you learn when bringing them into yours.
To that end, try not to bring your world into theirs. Leave the company-logo clothing (and accessories) at home. Wearing your colors is fine when you’re rooting for the home team or taking your hog to Sturgis, but it has no place in the interviewing room (see Figure 2.3).
FIGURE 2.3 Displaying your affiliation may be appropriate in some settings, but not typically during fieldwork.
Be Ready to Ask Questions for Which You Think You Know the Answer
You already know how you plan a balanced meal, prepare your taxes, or select an aspect ratio on your HDTV. You may already have an idea about how your participant does those things (because of what you’ve learned about them during the screening process, or implied by something they said earlier in the interview, or assumed by what you’ve seen other people do in the past). However, you need to be open to asking for details anyway. I’ll have more to say in subsequent chapters about asking questions, but for now keep in mind that to embrace their world you need to explore the details of their world. Some people fear that they are being false by asking a question if they think they know the answer. But don’t be so confident with your own presumptions. Interesting tidbits can emerge when you ask these questions, as this hypothetical example suggests:
Question: When are your taxes due?
The answer (which you already know): April 15
The response you fear: Why are you asking me this stuff? Everyone knows that it’s April 15. Get out of my house, jerk face!
The type of answer you are just as likely to get if you swallow your discomfort and ask the question anyway: I always complete everything by March 1. I think it’s April 15 this year, but I never really pay attention to that.
The goal here is to make it clear to the participant (and to yourself) that they are the expert and you are the novice. This definitely pays off. When I conduct research overseas, people tangibly extend themselves to answer my necessarily naïve questions. Although it’s most apparent in those extreme situations, it applies to all interviews. Respect for their expertise coupled with your own humility serves as a powerful invitation to the participant.
Nip Distractions in the Bud
Tactically, make sure that you are not distracted when you arrive. Take care of your food, drink, and restroom needs in advance. When I meet up with colleagues who are coming to the interview from a different location, we pick an easy location (such as a Starbucks) for a pre-interview briefing. It gives us time to acclimate into interview mode, review the participant’s profile, catch up on what’s been happening in the field to date, and address our personal needs. If your brain is chattering, “Lord, am I famished! When’s lunch?” you are at a disadvantage when it comes to tuning into what’s going on in the interview.
Needless to say, silence your mobile phone and don’t plan on taking calls or checking texts or emails during the interview. I say “needless,” but I met a team that took a different approach. Sensitive to the commitment their internal clients were making in leaving the office for fieldwork, they allowed mobile device usage during the interview, within limits. Although they were inspired by one colleague who had the stealth-check-below-the-table move down cold, most people weren’t able to handle it quite so deftly. It was a good lesson to learn; they won’t be allowing cell phones in the future. Mind you, even if one were successfully stealthy, that’s beside the point.
