
Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

Physicians and therapists are familiar with the “doorknob phenomenon,” where crucial information is revealed just as the patient is about to depart. So consider keeping your recording device on, even if it’s packed up.
Steve Portigal • 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
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It became an important lesson for me: Reframing the problem extends it; it doesn’t replace the original question.
Steve Portigal • Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
Ask, “What would we design for this user?” Don’t worry about being too conclusive; this is a provocative way to start making sense of the interview. You aren’t making design decisions; this is hypothetical, speculative, and easily discarded when future data takes you in a different direction. Make sure that your fellow researchers understand hypoth
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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.”
Steve Portigal • Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
Stories are where the richest insights lie, and your objective is to get to this point in every interview.
Steve Portigal • Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
Near the end of the interview is a great opportunity to ask more audacious questions. Because you’ve spent all this time with your participants, talking through a topic in detail, they’ve become engaged with you. You’ve earned their permission to ask them to go even farther beyond the familiar. Two questions that work really well here are: • If we
... See moreSteve Portigal • Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
Shifting the discussion from the conceptual to the tangible (even when being tangible means being fantastical) is one way to get at hard-to-uncover information.
Steve Portigal • Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
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.