User Interviews — A Great Way to Understand and Design For Your Users
You may have noticed that there are very few people alive who think like you. So there is no reason to believe that users think like you! To understand and design for users, you need to go out and meet them, and user interviews are a great way to do this.
User interviewing is the primary method of user experience. This is a great way to get a basic understanding of the issues your users are facing.
Designing For Your Users
Designers experience a constant internal struggle between wanting to design for themselves and knowing how to plan for their users. Experienced designers will tell you that a good motto during your design work is to understand your audience and design with them in mind. Whatever you do, don’t make assumptions about your users — it can lead you down a dangerous path!
User interviews are not just talking to people. Not just listening to their likes and dislikes. User interviews aim to understand what the user is trying to do and what their problems are.
User interviews are not about what they want you to build or do. They don’t even ask what they want. User interviews are about discovering what the user is trying to do and understanding what isn’t working for them.
Empathize and Understand the User’s ViewPoint
Interviews are an important part of the design process. This technique can be used in the 3 different phases, Empathize, Ideate, and Test. Interviews can be used by the user.
- Try to understand the user’s point of view about a specific problem.
- Let us understand how we can solve a specific problem that the user is facing.
- We have created a solution that is usable for people.
Conducting an Interview — How to Conduct a Good Interview
* Define the Your Interview goal
Start each new interview with a clear understanding of the purpose of your research. You should know why you want to conduct the interviews and what you want to do. For example, you might want to learn why 50 per cent of users who reached the product checkout phase in your e-commerce app abandon the checkout flow.
Tip: Involve key stakeholders when defining your research objectives. By getting buy-in from them, you add even more weight to the process.
* Recruiting User Personas for Interviews
Once you’ve set a goal, you can move on to recruit participants for the interview. You should start with your ideal user types and sample for your interviews like your user personas and try to find participants that match them. If you have multiple user personas, decide whether you want to focus on one particular group of users or several.
* Don’t Start an Interview Without a Discussion Guide
Very important don’t start an interview without a prepared discussion and guide. An inquiry guide is a document in which you formulate the questions you want to ask your participants. Your discussion guide should be tied to the purpose of your research and the questions you should ask.
It’s not just because you need a discussion guide and questions to ask during the interview. Think of it more like a reference document, a “skeleton” for your discussion, rather than a script. The guide should serve as a reminder of the questions you want to ask and the topics you want to cover.
Tips:
- Keep the script reasonably short.
- Write clear questions.
- Avoid long questions
- Don’t ask people what they want
Now that you’ve prepared, the next step is to ensure that the actual user interview goes according to plan.
Take a Deep Breeze and Smile
Take a deep breath and stretch before you enter the room. Since positive attitudes are contagious, your interviewee will likely feel better, too.
Ask open-ended questions
Open-ended questions are especially important when you are doing foundational research and finding out what people are trying to do.
You want to ask open-ended questions because they yield expansive responses. Also, avoid using vague words. There are vague words, and they are open to interpretation. For example, asking a user “is this a useful feature?” could give you bad data.
Asking a Yes/No Question
Sometimes it is necessary to ask follow-up questions with yes/no for clarity, but in general, it is intended to interview the user specifically to get a detailed answer. Asking yes / no questions rarely yields good, detailed and broad answers. You may not intend to ask yes / no questions, but if you give people a chance to answer in one sentence, they will often take the easy route.
Ask from different angles
Personally, asking the same question from multiple angles gives me more in-depth data than simply asking it all at once. Asking back to back is also a NO No The key to doing this is to spread these questions throughout your user interview script. You want to ask the question once, ask a bunch more questions to get the person thinking deeper and then ask a similar question from another angle to see if you can get deeper information.
Avoid Dud Questions
Some questions are not easy to answer. They may or may not elicit much information. Other questions simply confuse people. Occasionally, you may have a question that causes people to react Negatively.
You should make a note of which questions you ask and which ones you don’t.
Analyze User Interviews
When the user interview is over, thank the participant for their time and effort. It will allow them to provide feedback and will clarify any doubts that they have about the session.
When the participants leave, you must read through your notes, and save the interview recording, if it's virtual(TIP: Ask for permission before recording) to be aware of any specific points that you notice. You should do this right away because your memory is fresh, and you remember more.
Because user interviews provide qualitative rather than quantitative data, analyzing this data is time-consuming and difficult. We will discuss this with the whole group during this review. As mentioned earlier, there are three main reasons for conducting user interviews. For these three specific reasons, your results may vary. By interviewing users for empathy, you can analyze information about how to create a design solution and what needs to be done to overcome user pain points. If you conducted user interviews during the idea generation stage, you can analyze the information you receive and come up with new ideas through brainstorming sessions with your team. If you’re interviewing to test your prototype, you can discuss with your team where you need to change the prototype and how it can be improved.
The one that works best for me is a result set with lots of symbols and annotated screenshots/photos. I can also provide a written summary of my findings for those who want to read something relatively quickly and understand the lay of the land.
Final Note
User interviews are a simple and cost-effective way to gain insight into what users think about a particular idea, prototype or product. As designers, we always need to know the user’s point of view on a design, so getting an interview is probably the easiest way. Knowing how users feel and think can help you create design solutions that provide the best user experience.
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