<aside> 🗣️ User interviews are 1-on-1 conversations with current or potential users to understand their pain points, attitudes, goals, and behaviors.
</aside>
We can ask ****existing or target users for redesigns, or new designs, in order to turn their insights into personas, and determine ****key attributes of our user and their needs to help prioritize what features we design.
Interviews are limited in scope because we cannot draw statistically significant conclusions nor evaluate solutions (see usability tests). However, we can draw rich evidence from users' personal experiences that we could not obtain through quantitative data alone to make our designs human-centered.
For instance, ethnography refers to research done in wherever the user normally interacts with a product, like at home for an AI assistant, or at work for a smart printer. This ideal for seeing their context, from what interruptions they encounter to "cheat sheets" they use (ex: post-its on their laptop).
We can incorporate contextual inquiry, a type of ethnographic research that has participants walk you through their tasks.
User research is best done in person to build trust and read facial expressions and body language, but virtual research works as well!
<aside> ✈️ Always run a pilot or review session with a teammate, and prepare a backup plan if the technology or other plans go wrong.
</aside>