Interviewing Users. Steve Portigal

      

       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 ( rosenfeldmedia.com/books/user-interviews/) contains a blog, sample documents, related articles, interviews, and presentations. The book’s diagrams and other illustrations are available under a Creative Commons license (when possible) for you to download and include in your own presentations. You can find these on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/.

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. Chapter 6 is devoted entirely to techniques for asking questions.

       Why would we bother to talk to our users? We use our products every single day and know exactly what we need to build.

      People who make a product think and talk about it fundamentally differently than people who don’t. While both groups may use the same product, their context—understanding, language, expectations, and so on—is completely different. From a user’s point of view, a Big Mac eaten in Moscow is hardly the same product as a Big Mac eaten in San Jose, CA. And neither one is very much like a Big Mac eaten at McDonald’s Hamburger University in Oak Grove, IL. A strong product vision is important, but understanding what that vision means when it leaves your bubble is make-or-break stuff. In Chapter