Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

In a conversational setting, we are perhaps striving to talk at least 50 percent of the time, and mostly to talk about ourselves.

What I’m calling interviewing is also referred to by other names: user research, site visits, contextual research, design research, and ethnography,

My own expectations are muted, blunted, and distributed.

Are you asking the question in a way they can answer? In a study about customer service, a participant complained passionately about the poor telephone service he received from a retailer.

Interviewing creates a shared experience, often a galvanizing one, for the product development team (which can include researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product management, and beyond).

It became an important lesson for me: Reframing the problem extends it; it doesn’t replace the original question.

that people don’t necessarily experience all those stages or experience them in that order. A contrasting model is the beat sheet (see Figure 5.1), a tool for screenwriters that lays out the necessary sections of a typical three-act screenplay, a ubiquitous structure for Hollywood films. There are even beat-sheet calculators that will take the numb

Asking that person to play the teacher role not only reinforces the idea that she is the expert here, but it also can make it easier for her to articulate the details you are seeking.

people find the pain of the problem to be less annoying than the effort to solve it.