User Interviews
August 28, 2017 at 2:12pmUser Interviews
August 28, 2017 at 2:12pmHey guys! I’m a product designer at Managed by Q and am trying to learn what is the best way to approach interviewing users as a designer. Our product team conducts at least 4 - 5 user interviews every week. We are using interviews to test future designs with InVision prototypes, validate new features, and obtain feedback about the product. I'm new to conducting and interviewing users, and I’m curious to know how other product teams approach user interviews. Some of the things I'd love to learn more about include:
- Does your team conduct user interviews? If so how frequently and for what purpose?
- What are some of the tools you use to conduct and document user feedback?
- What are some of the design tools you use to present and test designs?
- Who leads the interviews and what is your role (as a designer) in the interview?
- What do you do to prepare for the interviews?
Also wondering what books, talks, or resources out there have been helpful.
August 28, 2017 at 7:03pm
- User Testing, super useful at recruiting users, recording interview sessions,
- Invision, we share invision prototype through Usering testing with our user.
- Optimalworkshop: very useful for some quick tast and it is free
The designers either run the interview session themselves or the PM lead the sessions and designer ask questions
To prepare for the interview: - A doc with a list of questions I want to ask: - Start with questions around the user background such as, do you have employees, how many? How often do you go to the bank? - A prototype that users can click through and test a couple of times.
1Books:InterviewingUsers, It is our research
2Definitely need to work on entering user interviews with clear goal in mind and having a document/script has helped a lot. Have also learned that interviewing users is not something natural for me, so I need to continue practicing—for some reason the fact that it's an interview makes the conversation feel different haha, especially when over the phone as I can't see the person I'm talking with.
I started reading Eriks Halls' 'Just Enough Research', and will take a look at the books you mentioned @effy
I started with just go meet the user. There is a coffee shop in mission, SF, I just go there buy a coffee every week and chat with the owner for 20-30 mins, and I learnt a lot.
I mean, the coffee shop use the product i designed
Depending on the product and the stage you are at you might want/can test your design/prototype/product less or more frequently and in different ways. Usually I've tried to have people looking at some of our design work every 2 weeks (you can't really do more often if you really work on the outcomes of your research, unless you have multiple research teams).
You
You can find a lot of insight from Tomer Sharon (ex Google and now Head UX at WeWork https://medium.com/@tsharon). Since he joined WeWork he spent a lot of time in improving their design/research cycle and shared a lot of what they've done and how. They also built a tool to collect research design outcome pills to share across the company.
2The most important thing in the whole ux research is having clear goals, don't skew the users and let them speak, and actually take actions on the outcome, which usually is the thing the most companies get wrong.
1Tools to test design you can really decide what you like depending on what you're testing. I've used anything like sketch on paper, Axure prototypes (Invision/Marvel is quite limiting when working on a solid prototype) or real HTML/JS. But you can also find values in tools like Verify, optimal workshop and Usabilla
1Verify is now deprecated and has been replaced by https://zurb.com/helio/ (haven't used it yet)
For the interview itself you need to have a script and try to stick to your wording as much as possible. Depending on the type of test tho, you might want to give less or more freedome to users and let them explore, in that case you might be able to observe and come up with relevant and not leading questions on the spot.
1August 29, 2017 at 1:34pm
When we conduct the interviews depends on the project but ideally we would like to gather qualitative data from interviews to inform the product decisions we make before starting a new product or feature.
We also conduct interviews and supervised tests at various points in our product development workflow to try and validate our goals before certain release points of the product.
What are some of the tools you use to conduct and document user feedback?
Zoom for communication when the interview is conducted remotely. Zoom is great because it has the ability to record the meeting.
Google Slides to help facilitate the interview if you need to show specific examples of things or concepts