Interviews are Lead (Pb) not Gold (Au)

by Derrick Parkhurst
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Interviews are an incredibly useful method for studying the user experience. However, there are a few major things to remember about interviews.


  • Interviews measure user experience
      • where we are particularly interested in how the user perceives what happened. What the user perceives can be quite different than what actually happened. Both are part of the user experience, but the primary goal of interviews is to extract the user's perceptual experience.
  • What you get out of an interview is what you put in
      • It is easy for the interviewer to get so invested in the success of the product that they allow this investment to bias the way in which they ask questions in an interview. Interviewer bias is present anytime a question is asked in a way that precludes a particular response. For example, consider the following question. Can you tell me how much you liked our newest website feature, tabbed navigation? Instead, the question should be asked in a non-directed fashion and focus on the user's immediate experience. Can you tell me about your use of the tabbed navigation on the website?
  • Users are politicians too
      • Users won't always tell you what they believe. Sometimes they will do this to avoid conflict. Sometimes, they will do this so that they can look smart. Users will often answer questions that you didn't ask and completely ignore your question. Maybe your question just isn't interesting to them. Users like to talk, but about interesting things. Users might not know the answer to your question, and so they make one up. Interviewer: What did you think about the tabbed navigation? Interviewee: (Tabbed navigation, what's that?) Oh that was really easy to use, no problem. This can also be true when you ask about an opinion that has not had enough time to be fully formed.

    Like I said, interviews are an increadibly useful method for studying the user experience. However, in order to turn transcripts (PB) into recommendations (Au) you need to think about these three things.