Is User Interview a Waste of Time?
User interview is widely used in human-centred design process. Design thinking encourages us to first and foremost develop user empathy before designing a solution. To empathise, we talk to users.
But we have heard Steve Jobs said, “It’s not the customers’ job to know what they want.” And Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they want, they would have said faster horses.” Both utterances by the two greatest entrepreneurs seem to indicate the frivolousness of asking users what they want.
In a book titled Mindware (2015), psychologist Richard Nisbett described about our tendency to overemphasise the usefulness of verbal reporting by users. He termed the tendency as the Interview Illusion. Nisbett considered user interview as “a very small, fragmentary, and quite possibly biased sample of all the information that exists about the person.”
A confluence of factors can taint the veracity of user interview data. Users’ motivations, emotions, beliefs and judgements are situationally mutable. So, different context and interview dynamics can illicit different responses from same user. Consider this example on how interview structure can affect user responses:
Scenario 1: Request a user to describe his experience after winning a voucher in your app. Then, follow by a question about her satisfaction with your app.
Scenario 2: Ask the user about her satisfaction with your app.
You likely to get different answers from same user. In Scenario 1, the user is primed by the triggered feel-good memory of winning the voucher. It is likely she will express great satisfaction with your app. In Scenario 2, her satisfaction level is probably not as high as Scenario 1.
Most user interviews promise (monetary) reward for participation. This too can affect user feedbacks. With anticipation of the reward, the interviewee may avoid saying things that he thinks may offends and disappoint the interviewers and overstate the positive aspects. People wants to look good in front of others and hence, the social desirability bias.
Instead of relying heavily on what the users verbally report, observe their behaviours. Nisbett wrote: “whenever possible don’t listen too much to people talk the talk, watch them walk the walk.” Get out of the building and observe how your users use your products. Don’t just talk to them but see how they use your product to get their jobs done. Seeing how your user try to use your booking app using his low-end smartphone while waiting for train, for example, can provide enlightening perspectives. In addition to observing users in their natural habitat, you must leverage on behavioural analytics to understand how users behave when using your app. By combining these data sources, you can piece together a more accurate representations of your users preferences and motivations.
Even with its deficiencies, talking to users is still worthwhile to do. Through conversations with users, product creators can fine-tune their understanding of customer perception and pinpoint users’ pain-points. In other words, empathise.