Experiential lessons from designing User Interview Exercises

I prefer bringing out my design strategist persona out during the user interviews and I like to get the audience on the other end weave their stories. The few experiential learning that came through this experience

1. Steve Portigal’s “Interviewing Users: How to uncover compelling insights” was a lovely read that opened my head to some great ideas. [You can find the book here]

2. An objective is a must. I had quite a time thinking of why objectives had to be defined. narrowing them down was hard. This is really where you don’t try to do it all yourself because you cannot. I created on those objectives as I understood them and then got down with stakeholders to help me prioritize the list. Further, this set a clear vision for what needed to be validated through the user interviews. In fact initially, when there seemed three or four objectives, and I had already started on the preparation of the questions, I was also able to see a hierarchy of workflow arrive for me. This also made it easier for me to understand the new organization I had just joined, because of how I saw this was helping them achieve their business goals.

3. While the objectives were clearer now then before, I ran a few initial interviews to dig a bit into themes that I may eventually discover. I categorized my interview responses to understand the user actions, their preparations, motivations and frustrations. This was an extremely useful exercise.

4. Based on this initial step, we worked on creating a questionnaire. Initially, this seemed too granular. I was sure I knew the answers. Yet as Steve says “don’t be so confident with your own presumptions” and frankly, every interview has revealed a lot of subtleties that I definitely didn’t expect.

5. Do a brain dump. As much as you may expect the responses for your interviews and the questions that you may have put together, it’s largely that you will have a bias or a preconceived notion that you want to leave aside. I did mine and had my fellow stakeholders try to also put this down on the questionnaire as our own responses. This definitely was a lovely tip I found in the book. This got me to a neutral space where in, while I tried to interview, I took a step back to let the interviewees in their zone. Further, I was able to understand the motives from the stakeholder’s perspective and what was possibly the responses that were going to be important to them.

6. I find it very easy to break ice and perhaps that’s been the biggest strength to be able to gather insight. As a novice in the education industry, I could let myself be a student. I didn’t worry about asking a why further, or to explain the most mundane task so I could understand as a layman. This, I think is easily a challenge to a lot of product managers who assume that they know what the customer requires. Every interview was a different experience. In some I had to paraphrase to get my interviewee thinking more. I like to not pitch or lead with responses, however, in some cases, I had to when I realized some of my audiences were a bit tad shy or were quite happy with their current workflows, I paraphrased their own responses, and asked if they would be happier as is, or was there any thing else that would make their lives better.

7. Finally, every interview can be draining. Take a break and especially if this is a long one, you would know that you and your interviewee are left less energized. At this point, you should realize, the interviewee’s responses or your own interest is waning and the responses may be fudged, because of the need to want to finish faster than your could possible do so.

8. One of my exercises that I am yet to do, is reflective spreadsheet I want to put up, to understand the pitfalls of the outcome. For this, I have decided that I will measure the average time and how well my questions were received, (if they had to be repeated or not, if the questions were open-ended enough to lead to further ‘Whys’). This way, I could hope to do better the next opportunity.

9. Lastly, in my opinion, always leave your rational head outside, slip on a cloak of empathy and let the audience be and speak to what they want to. I traveled to one of the learning centers to speak to a user and I realized how that travel lead me to actually get me to feel a bit of their pain. So much for a insightful interviewing experience indeed!

Originally published at thedesignsimile.wordpress.com on January 11, 2019.