Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash
Interviews are one of the most fundamental tools for helping us understand, empathize, and get inspired by the people and businesses we’re designing for.
At Shopify it’s not just researchers that conduct interviews with our merchants: product designers and content designers also have an important role to play in understanding who they’re building products for and how those products are fitting into our users’ lives.
Research interviews are one of our key tools to accomplish this, though, like any tool, they have specific functions, limitations, and risks so it’s important to know when and how to use them. As a Senior Staff Product Researcher at Shopify, I’m going to provide a way to think about when to use interviews, what they can (and cannot) do, and offer some tips on how to make them effective.
Understanding some fundamentals about planning and conducting user interviews can help you wield them for learning and inspiration.
“The goal of interviewing users is to learn about everything that might influence how [they] might use what you’re creating.” — Erika Hall, Just Enough Research
Interviews are useful when you want to understand the needs, challenges, goals, and perceptions of the people you’re designing for.
You might conduct them at the beginning of a project to build an understanding of your users and the problem you’re focused on, during a project when you want to narrow in and evaluate design solutions, or after your project has shipped when you want to understand how the solution is working for your users and how you might improve it.
Although this may seem like the fastest way to understand how to solve a problem, people are actually poor predictors of their future selves, and often don’t know if a solution will work for them until they try it.
Although interview subjects will often be quick to tell you the things that they would like to see, your role should be to interrogate and identify the underlying outcome they’re trying to achieve. What is the problem they’re experiencing that they believe their solution will solve? How is that problem impacting them today?
Interview subjects are experts on their experience, needs, and attitudes; the role of the interviewer is to understand these behaviours and beliefs. Understanding these will help you to address persistent problems and identify opportunities that can be applied to the spaces in which we’re experts.
Interviewing is a research method that should be approached systematically.
A systematic approach should be taken not just in how you run the interview session, but also in how you design your study, decide who you interview, determine how many interviews to do, and approach how you analyze your data.
Taking this approach with interviewing is how you build knowledge that is reliable, credible, and can propel design forward. One-off conversations, on the other hand, risk over-indexing on a single perspective and can lead to inaccurate or unreliable conclusions.
This does not mean that you shouldn’t be having one-off conversations with the people that you’re building products for. These conversations can help you feel closer to, and inspired by, your users, and can also provide insights that help you generate hypotheses and questions to be addressed through more rigorous research. You should absolutely be having conversations with users, but also be clear on the limitations of those conversations.