¡ Start with a proto persona so you can
recruit the right people
¡ Remember you’re looking for unbiased
feedback!
¡ Usually about 30 minutes in length
¡ Best is to have one person conduct the
interview while another researcher
takes notes
¡ Encourage storytelling. Once you succeed in encouraging
storytelling, you can get far better insights into the
problems your users are facing. Storytelling allows the
user to talk about her feelings—which is great for
understanding her deeper motivations. The more detail
she can provide, the more information you will have—and
the better the design decisions you will be able to make.
[Link]
¡ Avoid a fixed set of questions. It’s a
conversation, not an interrogation. Just as the
best type of job interviews should be, anyway.
You’re not trying to test the person—you’re
trying to understand as much as possible about
them. Learning how to drive a conversation and
build empathy with the user is not easy.
[Link]
¡ Don’t ask people what they want. There is a huge
amount of literature that explains why this is a bad idea.
Avoid speculative questions: they are not going to tell you
much about the user’s real needs and goals. People can’t
tell you what they want and they are mostly unable to spot
their struggles and difficulties too. They can tell you what
they are trying to achieve and what their goals are. And
that’s enough for you to design solutions for their
problems.
[Link]
¡ Don’t make the user a designer. Avoid asking
the user to draw screens for you. If he or she
suggests modification to the design, gently ask
what the reason for this modification is, and
what problem it would solve. This allows you to
understand your user’s motivation and thought
process more deeply and to figure out the best
design for their needs.
[Link]
¡ Avoid leading questions. All of us have hypotheses and
assumptions. These should be left far behind. You need to
make sure you are not suggestive with your questions.
This would result in false results, which are really harmful.
Try to ask open-ended questions so you can avoid
accidentally suggesting an answer. Instead of asking “How
difficult do you find it to use feature X?”, ask “What’s your
impression of using feature X?”
[Link]
¡ Don’t go too much into details. User interviews should
be about the user and their [Link] into details
might sound like a good idea at first, but it will typically
just lead to endless conversation. It is also the perfect way
to turn the user into a designer and get them to avoid
storytelling–which is exactly the opposite of what you
want! Just make sure you take one step back, whenever
you find yourself getting too deep into the details.
[Link]
¡ Pay attention to body language. Some
people might find it hard to express
themselves, so paying attention to their
body language is a great idea to get more
insight into how they feel. If you can
recognise discomfort or tension on your
user’s face, or in their body language, you
can ask better questions.
[Link]