In the design process, you can use various methods or a mix of methods to make the product, website or app "better" in the sense of "user-centred" - in other words, you gain valuable insights into the world of the user.
In UX design, we like to make use of the repertoire of methods that have proven themselves in the social sciences. So I thought we'd give you a few insights into some of these methods 🙂
The first part starts with a well-known and popular method - the qualitative user interview - and the fundamental question: When does it even make sense to conduct one?
First: The role of narrative interviews in the design process
Interviews can play a major role in the design of (digital) products - once a) in the area of user interviews e.g. to "tease out" attitudes or motivations on a certain topic or to gain "expert insights" into complex, unfamiliar topics, or b) in the area of stakeholder interviewsto find out which goals are being pursued from a product/business perspective - in other words: to find out the core of the goals and to check whether there are serious differences of opinion/discrepancies here, i.e. in which direction things are heading.
For the sake of simplicity, I am writing here based on case a ) - the user interviews.
Isn't it easy?
"Let's just do a few quick interviews, then we'll know..."
The interview is a very popular method for obtaining data. By interview here I mean a mostly qualitative Data collection method - so a narrativei.e. an open, "narrative" oral interview with one or more people. Qualitative, as I am referring here to a more open-ended interview. There are also fully standardised interview methods that belong to the quantitative data collection methods and have no/less narrative - i.e. qualitative - character. In such cases, the survey is conducted using a strictly standardised questionnaire and is not kept flexible/narrative, but these are not dealt with here for the time being.
The interview is so popular because it apparently is so easy to carry out. It's easy - anyone can ask questions, you might think. But unfortunately it's not. A lot of things have to be taken into account if you want to obtain meaningful findings that will lead you further in the process.
Fig 01 First rule of qualitative research
If you have ever conducted an interview, you will have realised how complex it can be. Conducting an interview is also quite time-consuming - and therefore of course expensive. Just think of it:
- the recruitment of people
- the preparation (decide what kind of interview, prepare questions)
- the actual realisation
- the evaluation (e.g. transcription)
- plus the subsequent analysis
On the other hand, interviews provide you with insights Why people display a certain behaviour that you are often denied with purely quantitative tests. It therefore gives you the opportunity to generate new ideas and assumptions, Why something could be like this (hypothesis generation), which you can then scrutinise and test (hypothesis testing). We'll come back to this in more detail in a moment.
In other words, you should first weigh up very clearly whether an interview will help you to answer your question at all or whether another method might be better suited to answering the desired questions.
An interview can help you in these cases
1) Exploration of a completely new subject area: If you do not yet have any information about the subject area, i.e. you are at the very beginning and are "poking around" in a topic without a plan. Your intention is to gain initial insights into a topic and roughly explore the area in question. In the best case scenario, the interview will then answer these questions: What, how, why?
2) Wenn das „Wie“ da ist, aber das „Warum“ fehlt: If you already have information, but there are still gaps in your knowledge of certain processes. For example, tests may have already been carried out: you may have identified a certain behavioural pattern in a usability test or through other observations (user observation, Google Analytics or questionnaires) (like/how do people behave), but now we are in the dark, Why this pattern of behaviour exists. Through an interview, you can try to „warum“ to get on the track.
3) As useful preparation for a test: Of course, you can also use interviews to collect material for quantitative, hypothesis-testing tests (aka the "hard facts", such as questionnaires, usability tests, A/B tests).
In most questionnaires, for example, the answers are already predetermined by the researchers. This is called a "closed response system", which can of course be an objection to such survey measures. Or: as UX experts, we specify the wording and text for products, software programmes or websites and wonder why it is not understood.
The crux of the matter is the same in both cases: You don't know whether these linguistic categories, which originated in the brains of the researchers/UX experts, also correspond to the mental concepts/schemes of the test subjects/test persons/user groups. They may think in completely different "categories".
Therefore, a very good method is to conduct interviews with the target test group in advance - i.e. before a test (or questionnaire) is developed - on the exact topic of the planned test. This gives you an insight into the way of thinking, i.e. also into the formulations used by the test candidates. The same effect can often be seen with company websites, for example, which describe their competences/services in their own "internal language", but the internal is self-evident, but as a layperson or newcomer to the field, you don't understand a word.
Here you can make good use of an interview, for example, to design the labelling of navigation points in a way that is appropriate for the user group: i.e. using a spelling and a choice of words that corresponds to the way users think.
This makes sense, for example, for questions relating to specific professional groups (experts vs laypeople), or different age groups (children, adults, older people) etc.. The question that is answered here is therefore: "How" / In which categories do different groups of people think in order to describe a situation or topic?
This is essentially the same approach that is used for open card sorting.
The research cycle
As you can see, interviews are (mostly) qualitative in nature and are more suitable for generating hypotheses than for testing hypotheses. These new assumptions that you make on the basis of interviews can then be tested in more detail in further tests to see whether this new hypothesis/assumption is correct.
It works like a cycle: qualitative exploration - quantitative testing - qualitative exploration - quantitative testing, etc. 🙂
Fig 02 - The scientific method. Once at the bottom, you can start again from the beginning
As interviews are so time-consuming, you will usually only interview a limited number of people. Let's say you interview 5-10 selected people. Of course, you can't draw conclusions about the general public from this small number of responses - i.e. you can't apply these new findings to a certain user group, for example. Never ever.
One also speaks of low "external validity "* - i.e. the data obtained cannot be generalised.
However, since interviews - as already mentioned - generally have more of an "exploratory"/hypothesis-generating character, i.e. they first serve to "get a taste" of an area, this non-existent generalisability is not quite so important, as the hypothesis is only tested in further investigations/tests. You then check later: Is this really the case, or did the assumptions/findings from the interview only come about by chance?
As a general rule of thumb, you can say: think carefully about whether an interview will really help you with your question. A qualitative interview always makes sense if you first want to roughly "pre-sort". For example, if you want to get an idea of attitudes and/or motivation on a certain topic. Later in the process, you can then check this assumption in tests.
This all sounds like a lot of effort, and as we all know from many projects, unfortunately there is rarely enough time. Of course, you can also do the whole thing "lofi" and "quick and dirty". Especially when it comes to the mental concepts mentioned above (language, wording), you will quickly gain interesting insights that can broaden your own horizons.
You should just keep in mind that such a "quick & dirty" survey is very likely to provide a distorted picture of reality, and you should at least document/record or communicate this somehow. This should not become a habit 🙂
Next time, we'll take a closer look at the different types of interviews.
Key takeaways - When to consider a user interview:
- Reflect: Is the interview a sensible method in my case? What do I want to achieve, what question am I trying to answer?
- Always keep this in mind: An interview is more about gaining new insights/assumptions and not the testing of assumptions (hypothesis generation instead of hypothesis testing)
- Consider the time required (recruitment, preparation, implementation, evaluation)
- Keep in mind: The data collected cannot be transferred to the general public under any circumstances due to the small number of people who were randomly selected
* Validity is a quality criterion in the social science research process
Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cloneofsnake/14150603002/
