Interviewing Users. Steve Portigal

see the light, sending their engineers scurrying to fulfill this surprising new need.

      Without endlessly debating what Microsoft and their ad agency knew and when they knew it, suffice it to say that this advertisement reinforces this semi-mythical scooping model of user research.

FIGURE 1.1 Microsoft’s ad for Windows 7 suggests that their approach to innovation comes from fulfilling user requests.

      I’m calling it a semi-mythical model because this is exactly what some teams do. Although it may be better than nothing, the fact is that a lot of important information gets left behind. Insights don’t simply leap out at you. You need to work hard and dig for them, which takes planning and deliberation. Further complicating the scooping model is the fact that what the designers and engineers see as “pain points” aren’t necessarily that painful for people. The term satisficing, coined by Herbert Simon in 1956 (combining satisfy and suffice), refers to people’s tolerance—if not overall embracing—of “good enough” solutions (see Figure 1.2).

      Frankly, I discover satisficing in every research project: the unfiled MP3s sitting on the desktop, ill-fitting food container lids, and tangled, too-short cables connecting products are all “good enough” examples of satisficing. In other words, people find the pain of the problem to be less annoying than the effort to solve it. What you observe as a need may actually be something that your customer is perfectly tolerant of. Would they like all their food in tightly sealed containers? Of course. But are they going to make much effort to accomplish that? Probably not.

      Beyond simply gathering data, I believe that interviewing customers is tremendous for driving reframes, which are crucial shifts in perspective that flip an initial problem on its head. These new frameworks (which come from rigorous analysis and synthesis of your data) are critical. They can point the way to significant, previously unrealized possibilities for design and innovation. Even if innovation (whatever you consider that to be) isn’t your goal, these frames also help you understand where (and why) your solutions will likely fail and where they will hopefully succeed. To that end, you can (and should!) interview users at different points in the development process. Here are some situations where interviewing can be valuable:

FIGURE 1.2 In my family room, you can see a telephone (with cord askew) stored near the floor on a VHS rack that I also use to store CDs (which don’t fit) and empty CD cases. (Why am I keeping them?) Incidentally, the orange cord goes through the floor to an outdoor sump pump. And why do I even have these nearlyobsolete VHS tapes and CDs?

      • As a way to identify new opportunities, before you know what could be designed

      • To refine design hypotheses, when you have some ideas about what will be designed

      • To redesign and relaunch existing products and services, when you have history in the marketplace

       NOTE THE CASE OF THE IPOD PEOPLE

      Our company began working with a client after they had completed a quantitative study about where people used iPods. They had a list of top environments (such as Home, Work, In the Car, and so on), and they asked us to uncover the unmet needs that people had in those particular environments. It turned out that the specific within-environment needs people had were just not that big a deal, but what people really struggled with was moving between environments, or moving between contexts: from being alone to being in a social situation, from being stationary to being mobile, and so on. These were the real challenges for people. For example, if you’ve worn one earbud and let the other dangle so you could stay somewhat engaged, you’ve dealt with this particular issue.

      So, we excitedly reported to our client that we had found the “real” problem for them to solve. We were met with uncomfortable silence before they told us that they had committed organizational resources to addressing the problem as it currently stood. In our enthusiasm, we had trouble hearing them, and for a few minutes, the conversation was tense.

      Finally, we stated definitively that we had learned some specific things about the environments, and we saw a rich and complex opportunity in this new problem. And that was all it took. We delivered findings about each environment, and then we delved into the harder problem. It turns out that our client was eager to innovate, but they just needed to have their initial brief addressed. It became an important lesson for me: Reframing the problem extends it; it doesn’t replace the original question.

When to Use Interviewing

      There are numerous ways to gather data about users: usability testing, A/B testing, quantitative surveys, Web analytics, interviewing, focus groups, and so on. For the closest thing to a “Grand Unified Field Theory of User Research,” see these examples by Elizabeth B. N. Sanders (see Figure 1.3) and Steve Mulder (see Figure 1.4). Both do a nice job of creating an organizing structure around the surfeit of research techniques we are blessed with.

       ELIZABETH B. N. SANDERS, MAKE TOOLS, LLC 2012

FIGURE 1.3 A framework for different research techniques, factoring in different philosophical approaches toward the design process and the user’s role in that process.

       STEVE MULDER

FIGURE 1.4 Different research techniques, organized by what is being examined and which style of research objective we’re addressing.

       NOTE EXAMPLES OF USER RESEARCH APPROACHES

      • Usability testing: Typically done in a controlled environment such as a lab, users interact with a product (or a simulation of a product) and various factors (time to complete a task, error rate, preference for alternate solutions) are measured.

      • A/B testing: Comparing the effectiveness of two different versions of the same design (e.g., advertisement, website landing page) by launching them both under similar circumstances.

      • Quantitative survey: A questionnaire, primarily using closedended questions, distributed to a larger sample in order to obtain statistically significant results.

      • Web analytics: Measurement and analysis of various data points obtained from Web servers, tracking cookies, and so on. Aggregated over a large number of users, Web analytics can highlight patterns in navigation, user types, the impact of day and time on usage, and so on.

      • Focus group: A moderated discussion with 4 to 12 participants in a research facility, often used to explore preferences (and the reasons for those preferences) among different solutions.

      • Central location test: In a market research facility, groups of 15 to 50 people watch a demo and complete a survey to measure their grasp of the concept, the appeal of various features, the desirability of the product, and so on.

      Interviewing isn’t the right approach for every problem. Because it favors depth over sample size, it’s not a source for