Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17869520-interviewing-users
Chapter 1 Importance of Interviewing
- You may be a user, but be careful of being seduced into designing for yourself.
- 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 of “good enough” solutions.
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. - Impact of Interviewing: Increase in their overall capacity for empathy
This evolution in how individual team members view themselves, their design work, and the world around them starts to drive shifts in the organizational culture. This capacity for empathy is not sufficient to change a culture, but it is necessary. More tactically, these enlightened folks are better advocates for customers and better champions for the findings and implications of what has been learned in interviews
Chapter 2 A Framework for Interviewing
- At the beginning of the project, convene a brain dump. talk through assumptions, expectations, closely-held beliefs, perspectives, and hypotheses. Contradictions are inevitable and should even be encouraged.
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 - Ask Questions for Which You Think You Know the Answer: The goal here is to make it clear to the participant (and to yourself) that they are the expert and you are the novice. Respect for their expertise coupled with your own humility serves as a powerful invitation to the participant.
- Your choice of questions and how you ask them demonstrate that you are listening. Pay attention to how your body language cues your participant as to how well you are paying attention.
Chapter 6 How to Ask Questions
- Ask the shortest question you can, without directing them to possible answers you are looking for. Then be silent.
- Pay attention to whether or not you have received an answer to your question. Be prepared to follow up multiple times using different types of questions.
- Reflect back the language and terminology that your participant used (even if you think it was wrong).