{"id":238014,"date":"2023-08-24T12:59:43","date_gmt":"2023-08-24T12:59:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rosenfeldmedia.com\/?page_id=238014"},"modified":"2023-09-13T14:14:05","modified_gmt":"2023-09-13T14:14:05","slug":"interviewing-users-second-edition-sample-chapter","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/rosenfeldmedia.com\/interviewing-users-second-edition-sample-chapter\/","title":{"rendered":"Sample Chapter: Interviewing Users (2nd edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a sample chapter from Steve Portigal’s\u00a0book\u00a0Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (2nd edition)<\/em><\/a>. 2023, Rosenfeld Media.<\/p>\n

Chapter 1<\/h2>\n

Interviewing Addresses a Business Need<\/h3>\n

A few years back, I worked with a company that had the notion to turn a commodity safety product\u2014the hard hat\u2014into a premium product. They would incorporate advanced features and then charge a higher price point. I don\u2019t actually know where their idea came from, but one can imagine that they had seen all kinds of everyday products be reformulated to generate a higher scale of profit (think about Starbucks, gourmet salt, smartphones, Vitamix blenders, or horsehair mattresses). They sketched out a set of features that would improve the functional performance of the hard hat.<\/p>\n

When I interviewed people who wore hard hats for work, I didn\u2019t ask them to evaluate the features my client had been considering. Instead, I asked them generally about their work, so I was able to uncover insight into the most significant aspects of their experience. What they were concerned about fell into an entirely different category. They talked about leaving the job site to get lunch (for example) and how awkward they felt among other people while dressed in their prominent, brightly colored safety equipment. Indeed, makers of other safety equipment like bicycling helmets, safety footwear, and safety goggles had already redesigned their products to echo fashionable caps, boots, and sunglasses, suggesting this concern was being felt broadly.<\/p>\n

If there were to be a TEDx version of this story, then this team would have become very excited about this new and surprising area of opportunity, despite it being different from what they had already invested in (financially, intellectually, and even emotionally). They\u2019d have torn up those plans, drawn up new ones, and eventually raked in the dough. But you know that isn\u2019t really how these things play out! In these interviews, we uncovered a significant business risk in pursuing their existing idea, so they stopped product development for their hard hat with extra functionality. On the other hand, these interviews identified another opportunity: to produce a hard hat that would address the issue of social performance. That wouldn\u2019t have fit with their organization\u2019s technical or cultural competencies, so they chose to avoid the business risk of developing a fashionable hard hat. What we learned from these interviews informed their decision not to bring any product to market.<\/p>\n

When you get down to it, that\u2019s<\/em> what we do as user researchers: We gather information about users in order to inform critical decisions about design, product, or other parts of the business or organization. To do this means that we go to people\u2019s homes, their offices, wherever their context is. We ask what they do. We ask them to show us. We get stories and long answers where we don\u2019t always know what the point is. We want them to explain everything about their world to us.People may not have a ready answer as to why they do something, but we have to listen for why. We have to ask follow-up questions and probe and infer to try to understand, for ourselves, just why some-thing is happening the way it is. We make sense of this disparate information and show the way to act on what we\u2019ve learned.<\/p>\n

Interviewing<\/em> is a specific method in user research to accomplish these goals. (User research<\/em> is also referred to by other terms such as design research, user experience research<\/em>, or UXR.<\/em>) This book is about interviewing users (also referred to variously as site visits, contextual research<\/em>, or ethnographic research<\/em>) as a method to conduct user research, so beyond an in-depth examination of best practices for interviewing users, we\u2019ll also consider user research in general. And we\u2019ll also look at other user research methods that can be integrated and combined with interviews.<\/p>\n

Nomenclature aside, the broad outline for interviewing users is:<\/p>\n