Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

The goal here is to make it clear to the participant (and to yourself) that they are the expert and you are the novice. This definitely pays off. When I conduct research overseas, people tangibly extend themselves to answer my necessarily naïve questions. Although it’s most apparent in those extreme situations, it applies to all interviews. Respect

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).

What you’re learning is not an evaluation of the concept, but instead a deeper understanding of the design criteria for a future solution. Although concepts are the stimuli, you deliberately choose stimuli that contain some aspect of your hypotheses, ideas, or questions in a tangible form.

but I approach the interviews with a sense of what I can only call a bland curiosity.

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.

Don’t do this. Ask your question and let it stand. Be deliberate about this. To deal with your (potentially agonizing!) discomfort during the silence, give yourself something to do—slowly repeat “allow silence” as many times as it takes. Use this as a mantra to calm and clear your mind (at least for the moment). If the person can’t answer the quest

After you ask a question, be silent. This is tricky; you are speaking with someone you’ve never spoken to before. You

Interviews are not good at predicting future behavior, especially future purchase intent or uncovering price expectations. Asking those questions in an interview will reveal mental models that exist today, which can be insightful, but won’t necessarily be accurate.

As you develop, the process evolves from a toolkit for asking questions into a way of being, and you’ll find that many of the tactical problems to solve in interviewing are simply no-brainers. As George Clinton sang, “Free your mind...and your ass will follow.”