Steve Portigal author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, and founder of Portigal Consulting. answered this question from my in past interview: I want to step back for a second, and as a manager, let’s say, I send three people out to interview or just watch the experience. They can come back and give me completely different interpretations. So, how much value can I put in this?
Related Podcast and Transcription: Interviewing Users
Steve Portigal: I love that. That’s a great way of putting it. I think that the unique perspective is one of the things I enjoyed about doing fieldwork and trying to make sense of it. I think about setting up a study, series of interviews with whoever the team is going to be so that there’s some chance for success, and you don’t want to stand one person off to see customer A or one person to see customer Q and so on and then have them make overarching conclusions about what the need is or what the opportunity is. There has to be a way of combining that. It’s nice to do an interview in teams. But then that debris of two is really a nice size and then that conversation afterwards. What did you see? What did you see? It is really cool because people will see different things and that conversation it’s not really a battle about what’s right. It is really more of a way to conglomerate what those different impressions were and align on that and then to have if different people are talking to different customers, to have them come together and report things and so then what this conversation often include is people saying, “Oh yeah, our guys said the same things and for him it’s because of this and this, and this”.
You start to find commonalities and then you start to find contrast and part of what you want to do is understand why are those contrasts are. Well, of course, this customer didn’t have this problem because they are, in this kind of situation in their life cycle or in their technology or whatever that is. That hashing it out between the different people who have seen different things starts to uncover what the critical factors are and then now you are doing, now it’s what you do with the interview. Now, you are thinking about how we get to the implications for our product or design. I love that contrast. I loved that people are just messy. We have to kind of bring messy people in to try to deal with that and have a conversation. There’s process to that, just like you asked about interviewing. There’s a process to doing some of this sense-making, and I just give you a little scaffolding for how you might kind of bring these pieces together and to start to kind of line commonalities and contrast. You could structure it, but it is still kind of messy, and it just reflects the nature of what we are starting with which is people.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Interviewing Users
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