How to interview users
“Whether it is police officers interrogating a suspect or a lawyer cross-examining an opposing witness or a reference librarian helping a patron, the verbal exchange is a deliberate, learned speciality that goes beyond what happens in everyday conversation.
For you as an interviewer, it’s the same thing.”- Steve Portigal, “Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights”
Interviews are an essential part of UX research, aimed at learning and deeply understanding others. They may seem straightforward, but skillfully talking to people requires deliberate practice and fine-tuning over time.
What can interviews tell us?
Interviews are a qualitative research method. They help us understand people’s goals and needs, exploring the why behind behaviors, preferences and attitudes to help build a picture of what really makes our users tick.
Quantitative data is great for understanding magnitude, usage and trends, but it will never help us to understand why certain behaviors are happening in the first place.
Christian Rohrer (2014) from: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods
Interviews can help us understand our users, and answer questions like…
- What are their current processes and limitations?
- What do they struggle with?
- What are their users’ general attitudes?
- How do they think about a problem?
- What drives their current behaviors?
Without a doubt, interviews have many applications in user research. They’re great for exploring problem spaces, understanding user journeys, building our personas or validating assumptions.
