The Beginners’ Guide to Contextual Interviewing
A good customer interview during the discovery phase is not aiming to find out what people want — it’s aiming to find out why people want it. You are trying to get answers to three basic questions:
What is the user trying to get done? How does the user do it at the moment? What are the happy moments / pain points with the current process?
The most effective way to deal with this is to get people to show you how they achieve their goals at the moment and then observe them. Asking people to show you how they achieve their goals is a good way to get closer to authentic behaviour because it’s hard to fake.
As well as your participants, you should have an outline discussion guide to act as a framework for eliciting stories. This discussion guide will contain the key assumptions you need to validate. Make sure your discussion guide is brief: don’t see it as a Q&A but as a kind of scaffolding to elicit and structure stories.
A good field visit tends to have five stages:
Build rapport with the user. Transition from a traditional interview to a master-apprentice model. Observe. Interpret. Summarise.
Build rapport with the user
In this phase, which should take only 5 minutes or so, you will introduce yourself and describe your separate roles (user researcher / note-taker). Then you should explain the purpose of the study so the user knows what you care about.
As part of building rapport, you should also review your ‘shot list’ and get permission to take photographs.
you could always prime the participant about photographs and recordings before the visit.
Transition
In this phase, which should take a minute or so, the interaction moves from a traditional interview to a master-apprentice model. You should tell the user that you want to learn by watching and asking questions, as if you were an apprentice learning how to do their job.
Observe
Sometimes the best thing you can do is sit back and watch the way your user is behaving. Don’t think that you need to continually ask questions.
Interpret
In this phase, you verify your assumptions and conclusions with the participant. Skim back over your notes and review what you learnt.
Summarise
Immediately at the end of each session, grab an unlined 6’ x 4’ index card. You will use one index card for each of the participants in your study. The purpose of these index cards is to summarise your immediate thoughts: they won’t be a replacement for the transcripts or your more considered analysis but this step is vital to help stop your different participants blending one into the other.
Posted on January 20, 2020