Interviews are hard, but until we can learn
to read people's thoughts directly from their brains,
they are the single best way to learn
about your customers' mindsets, values, and belief systems.
Here are five common mistakes to avoid.
Mistake number one, not building enough rapport.
While interviews are a great way to learn a lot
about your customers,
we can't just cold call someone and ask:
(phone ringing)
- Hello?
- Hey, this is Therese.
Can you tell me about your mindsets, values,
and belief systems?
(crickets chirping)
You have to build rapport first.
This means introducing yourself
and even making a little bit of small talk.
While small talk can sound absolutely dreadful
to some people, I think small talk actually gets a bad rap.
It can be an incredible rapport-building detective tool.
Hi, Rachel, nice to meet you
- Hey.
- So, I'm Therese.
I'm the researcher that will be working with you
and I work with NN/g, so thanks so much
for taking the time to meet with us.
Where are you calling in from, by the way?
- Oh, well, normally, I'd be in Milwaukee,
but today I am in Chicago.
- If the interviewer hadn't asked
where they were calling from,
they would never have known that the person was working
from somewhere unusual
or that they were helping their family move.
Those two pieces of information can say a lot
about what someone might care about.
It's easy to go too far with rapport, though.
You mentioned you took a Lyft here.
So, are you from the area or?
- Yeah, I live in Seattle.
- Oh my gosh, I used to live in Kirkland.
- Really? - Yeah.
Oh, Seattle's so cool, isn't it?
- Yeah.
- I guess, Kirkland's kinda changed a lot I know
over the last five years.
I'm originally from Jersey City and over there,
it's like every five years, there's a new building.
Yeah, Kirkland, I guess it's a little more stable,
but you know, Seattle is pretty cool.
- Yeah.
- This conversation got derailed really fast
because the interviewer made it
about her own lived experiences
rather than that of the interviewee.
It's easy to do that
when you're trying to be seen as likable
or approachable as a person.
But don't worry so much about being liked
and focus on being an active listener instead.
Mistake number two, not probing enough.
Probing questions are questions
that help gain specific, in-depth, follow-up information
about a topic.
A lot of interviewers will shy away from probing too much,
either because it feels rude to pry
or because it makes them look like they don't know much
about the field.
- Yeah, the OKRs are really high-priority
on the stakeholders' lists right now,
so we've been working with PMs to get the backlog
on the APIs all straightened out.
- However, playing dumb is often a good tactic
to get more information
that otherwise wouldn't have been offered up freely.
Even if you have a good speculation
for what some words of phrases may mean,
sometimes assumptions are incorrect,
so it's worth asking anyway.
When you say PMs, that means?
Totally the project manager.
- Oh, actually, the product manager.
Yeah, we use PJM for the project manager,
but not everyone uses the right acronym
- Can you tell me more about that?
- Oh, yeah, the wrong people reply to emails all the time.
It's really annoying.
- See?
Probing can shed light on problems
that you may not have known existed.
Mistake number three, multitasking during the interview.
I get it, the texts, the pings, the calendar reminders,
we don't love when these disrupt an interview.
And some of it is unavoidable,
even when we mute our devices.
But the biggest culprit
of multitasking during interviews, note-taking.
Not only are we terrible note-takers
when we're facilitating an interview,
but it also makes us poor facilitators
by taking our eye contact away from the participant.
Instead, delegate note-taking to someone else
and when possible, record your interviews
for transcription and analysis later.
Mistake number four, allowing observers
to influence the interview.
An interview is a one-on-one conversation
and when people are interested in observing research,
that can be a good thing.
While it's not a deal breaker to have an observer or two,
imagine five people staring at you as you respond.
It gets a little scary.
And if more than one
tries to interject at the same time, yikes.
If you record the interview,
that can help avoid some of the issues
with too many observers.
But nonetheless, you should share some clear ground rules,
like limiting the number of staff in the room
to three people max
and have only the facilitator ask questions.
After all, it's the facilitator who's built the rapport.
Last but not least, the most compromising of all mistakes,
number five, leading the participant.
Sometimes, researchers accidentally show their cards
and say a little too much,
or they phrase a question a certain way
which primes the participant to respond differently,
their answers skewed by researcher behavior.
For example, if I were to ask,
"How do mobile devices play a role
during in-store price comparisons?"
this might prime the participant to give me examples
of times they've used their mobile devices
to compare prices.
But if I were to ask, "How do you shop for appliances?"
we might find very different user behavior,
like forgoing mobile devices
or maybe even uncovering new behavior,
like researching brand reputations in advance.
So, keep the study's purpose relatively vague.
Keep questions as open-ended as possible
and mind your body language as you go.
There you have it.
If you're interested in more user interview tactics,
check out our full-day course
on user interviews at nngroup.com.
Good luck.