In addition to gaining insights from observing people,

it’s also valuable to interview them — ask them about their experiences directly.

The first step in setting up an interview is deciding who it is that you’re going to interview.

It may seem obvious

but the most important thing is to get people who are representative of the target users of your system —

who are the people who are going to be using your system.

Talk to them!

Now they may be current users of a similar system if you’re creating a better something,

you’ll likely find current users and you’ll want to learn what they care about,

what problems they see.

They might also be non-users.

So, one reason that you might be building your technology

is to broaden the set of people that can do a certain task

and in that case you’ll want to talk to the non-users.

Learn about what barriers you see, learn about what their goals are.

Say, for example, you’re designing a lecture support system.

Who would you interview in this case?

There’s a lot of stakeholders: You might pick the teacher.

You might pick the students. You might also pick the teaching staff.

Maybe the department administrators that are responsible for making sure the grading is handled properly.

Maybe even the parents.

It’s important to get different types of users.

So, you might have both the freshman and a PhD student.

You might have a domestic student and an international student.

Somebody that’s in major and out of major.

Stronger and weaker students.

There are a lot of different kinds of users.

You can’t get them all, but you’ll want to find several different people

who are representative of major user groups, and talk to them.

How can you find these people?

Well, one great strategy, if you’re in the US, is to use Craigslist.

You can also reach out through friends and family.

Your social network is a powerful tool for finding people to interview.

That doesn’t just mean or even primarily mean “interview your sister”;

it means “ask your sister whom she might know”

or “ask your friend to put you in touch with people they might know.”

It’s quite likely that you’ll need to pay people.

In the Bay Area, on Craigslist,

somewhere in the land of 50 to 100 bucks for an interview seems to be the going rate.

This gets cheaper if you can have less specialized users.

Also, the amount that you’ll need to pay people depends on what they believe is going to be used for.

If you can convey that in some way you’re making the world a better place,

people may be willing to offer their time for free, even.

On the other hand, if they believe that something will be used for a profit,

they’ll likely want a fair wage for their time.

If you’re a skunkworks project and don’t have enough money to really pay people,

one thing that you can do is offer a token of appreciation.

People often appreciate a small thoughtful gift that they can actually use, like a gift certificate or some sort,

than they do cash.

For example, a couple of years ago I’ve spoken at a local high school

and the students gave me a gift certificate to a coffee shop.

Now, the amount of money there was not much; but I meant that every time I travelled,

I could go in the coffee shop in the airport and get a cup of coffee

and it reminded me of that group of students and their thoughtfulness.

Sometimes, especially early on the design project,

it can be difficult to get a hold of exactly the users that you believe will eventually be the target.

In this case don’t give up completely and interview nobody.

Do the best you can; approximate if necessary.

For example, if you are designing a system for doctors,

early on the project, you might need to satisfice and use medical students instead of doctors.

Or if you are working on something for software engineers, you might get computer science students.

Not ideal; better than nothing.

I’ve been teaching and doing research in human-computer interaction for about 15 years now

and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to students or others who say that there’s nothing to be found,

that, for the problem that they’re tackling, it’s either possible or obvious.

It’s very rarely the case that there is nothing new.

The more mundane the domain, the more creative you need to be.

If you don’t believe me, Malcolm Gladwell the writer

has a wonderful explanation in the introduction to his new book of collective stories « What the Dog [Saw] ».

“The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell.

I say trick, but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do.

Shampoo doesn’t seem interesting? Well, dammit, it must be, and if it isn’t,

I have to believe that it will ultimately lead me [to something] that is.”

“The other trick to finding ideas is figuring out the difference between power and knowledge.

You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story.

You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

My friend Dave, who taught me about ketchup, is a middle guy.

He’s worked on ketchup. That’s how he knows about it.

People at the top are self-conscious about what they say (and rightfully so)

because they have position and privilege to protect —

and self consciousness is the enemy of ‘interestingness.’”

“In ‘The Pitchman’ you’ll meet Arnold Morris, who gave me the pitch

for the ‘Dial-O-Matic’ vegetable slicer one summer day in his kitchen on the Jersey Shore:

‘Come on over, folks.

I’m going to show you the most amazing slicing machine you have ever seen in your life,’ he began.

He picked up a package of barbecue spices and used it as a prop.

‘Take a look at this!’ He held it in the air as if he were holding up a Tiffany vase.

That’s where you find stories, in someone’s kitchen on the Jersey Shore.”

What makes a good question when you’re interviewing?

Let’s look an example and you can decide whether you think this is a good question.

Our question is: “Is the daily update an important feature to you?”

My guess when asked a question like this is that most users would say “Yes.”

It’s kind of a leading question.

Most people, when asked if something’s important, “Sure, why not?”

What’s at stake? Why would you say no?

If you wanted to learn about the daily update, participant observation might be a lot more effective

because you could see whether people actually use the daily update

or you might even use log files as a way of driving your questions.

So, for example, you might ask somebody, “I see from the log that you’ve never used the daily update.

Why is that? Tell me more.”

Especially early on, the more open-ended your questions are, the more interesting the answers that you’ll get.

Remember — back to our Walmart example — they asked a leading question:

“Would you like stories with less clutter?”

The answer, of course, is “yes”, but it may not be what people would actually want.

Here’s another example of a question: “What would you like in a tool?”

The problem with this question, at least as a beginning or primary question,

is that users are experts in their own lives.

They’re not experts in design — that’s your role — so people may not know what to say.

There’s a famous fable in design attributed to Henry Ford where he says that,

“if I asked people what they wanted in the age of the horse and buggy,

what they’d say they want is a faster horse.”

And of course we know that the designers used the possibility of the car,

but users may not know about that yet.

Instead, it’s more valuable to ask users about their own lives and their own goals.

That’s what people are experts in.

Here are three other types of questions to avoid because people aren’t very good at self report for them;

Asking people what they would do or like or want in a hypothetical scenario — too hard to know.

Asking us how often we do things — We often lie to ourselves.

For example, “How often do you exercise?” Most people overestimate in their answer to that question.

Other questions about how are things similar. This works better if you can make things concrete.

“How much do I exercise in a typical week?” — Not very reliable.

“How much did I exercise this week?” Well, I’m likely to give more truthful answer to that one.

It’s more concrete, and more recent in my memory.

I suggest also avoiding asking people how much they like things on an absolute scale:

What does “seven” mean?

Finally, avoid binary questions, things that have a yes or no answer.

“Do you like grapefruit?” – “Yes.” Not a very interesting interview.

So what are good questions?

Especially at the beginning of an interview, I recommend open-ended questions.

After asking the question, give somebody a chance to respond.

A little bit of silence is golden.

When I first started teaching, I made a mistake that a lot of young teachers make:

I would ask the class for a question, and after 17 milliseconds, when nobody had answered,

I would jump in and offer the question myself.

I trained the students that they didn’t need to be part of the class, that I would always answer every question.

There is no reason to participate.

One of my colleagues taught me to wait a little longer.

And it’s amazing, even in a quiet classroom, before students are used to interacting,

let those few seconds of silence happen and people will start to chime in.

The same is true in interviews.

You may get a quick answer at first. Let some silence happen.

After a few seconds, you’ll hear the second story. And the second story is often a lot more interesting.