Interviewing customers is the most powerful and profitable part of this
course.
It may seem easy since we talk to people all the time, but conducting
interviews to identify and isolate expensive problems in a business
requires a different approach. It involves a more narrative and
emotional perspective, which can make clients uncomfortable as they
often prefer hard, actionable results. However cringe it may seem, the
interviewing process yields those actionable insights.
I'm going to talk about the single most powerful and profitable part of this course, which is talking to people. Sounds easy. We talk to people all the time. We talk to our clients, our co-workers, our customers. But I don't think we do it like this.
And we don't do it in a way that tries to identify and isolate the expensive problems in a business. And we certainly don't do it in a way that's more narrative and emotional. I think that when I bring up things like emotions and feelings with my clients, they get very cringe about it. They're like, really? Really?
That's gonna do the thing? Because they want results. They want like hard, actionable things. And we'll get to the hard, actionable things. This yields hard, actionable things.
And it's one of the hardest parts of this entire course. I, in many ways, believe that I am still a student of interviewing. And I've been doing it consistently for almost 20 years now. So if you think you're bad at this or you end up bombing an interview or you end up with something disastrous, like man I have been there. I have been there so hard.
And you'll be there too, and that's okay. You dust yourself off, you figure it out. We're all figuring it out. We're all figuring out how to human. Sometimes you just get weirdos on the line, man.
I don't even know, right? And so there's always ways to refine a process. There's always new insights that you can possibly gather. And this is kind of the state of the art right now. I could give an entire workshop on how to interview.
And so when I did this initially as kind of a live workshop, I didn't talk about interviews at all. And that was because the only way to really comprehensively answer this is with five hours of talking. And we don't have five hours of talking. We have however long this is going to take. So keep that in mind when we're going through all of this.
At the end, I'll be providing some books that you should read as additional resources that will help you out a little bit. But ultimately, we're all trying to figure it out, and this is where the actual bread and butter is of the work that we do. It's the center of our practice. Truly, interviewing is the center of our design practice. It's the center of design, really understanding what people are trying to tell you they need, and responding to those needs.
When people tell you something, believe them. So the first thing that we do is recruit people. Recruitment is a pretty hard component of interviews, and I think the fact that it's necessarily the thing that has to happen first discourages a lot of people from doing it properly. There are a handful of ways you can possibly recruit people. One of them is by going into your past orders database, pulling down the most recent orders, filtering out anything that doesn't fit a certain set of criteria, like maybe the order was refunded or returned or never delivered or it hasn't arrived yet.
You want to be recruiting people who are starting to get value from your product. So there might be people who haven't completed an onboarding process, stuff like that. Filter out all that stuff. You want the meat of people who are recently starting to get value with the product. Because that's one of the peak moments of emotion after they make the purchase, and it's one of the peak moments of recollection as to what actually drove them to come and buy from you.
And you really, really, really wanna know that. You wanna make sure it's worth their time. So I email people when I'm actually recruiting and I tell them, hey, I'm an interviewer, researcher from this company, or a designer with this company. And we chat with people roughly every month or every quarter to get a sense of their needs. If you sign up with us, we'll have a $50 gift card worth your time, and I either send them an Amazon gift card, or I give them a discount code at whatever the business is, and then they come through and say, yes, I'd love to do this.
And I say, great, here's a scheduling link. So Calendly is like the big one, but there are a million scheduling bits of software. I think Cal.com is one. I use Fantastical, which works great with Apple devices. And then you get people on the phone, you follow up the day before, tell them what to expect, ask them to be in a quiet place, say that they need a stable internet connection, and then they do the interview, and it's great, right?
So that's another side of recruitment that really definitely matters, and you want to make sure you're kind of cat herding before they get on, and giving some space before and after the interview in your own scheduling so that you can decompress and write up things. I always keep a notepad in front of me, I always keep the interview recording, and then I'm able to actually go in and run it. You want to know what the agitator was that created the need? In business school parlance, this is called Jobs to be Done, and it's a thing pioneered by a business school professor named Clayton Christensen that basically says that products of all kinds are hired to do a certain job. Like this microphone, I have hired it as its own tiny little employee for me to talk into and sound good, right?
And you do this with everything. You do this with the computer that's recording this. You do this with the phone that I'm using to connect with my friends and family and live my life. And this happens writ large and writ small with various levels of emotional investment. So when you're going through and defining questions for the interview, you really want to know where was somebody and what were they thinking when they decided to start researching for the product.
What did researching for the product actually look like? Were they vetting competitors alongside you? Why did they choose to go with you? Have they encountered any sort of things that held them back from their purchase? What held them back as they were actually onboarding with the product?
Was it confusing for them to start getting value? Now, when I'm writing out questions for an interview, I am not going through that list in a wooden fashion and being like, and now, question six. That is a horrible way to run an interview. An interview is an unfolding, adaptive conversation with a customer, because they may lead you into places that you didn't expect yourself. So if you're trying to control the interview, like maniacally so, it's not going to go well with you because you're also not going to get a really comfortable person.
So you're defining these questions, yes. But you are also going to be deviating from the list of questions. I sometimes only write out six or seven questions for an interview. Sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter, sometimes people answer it just by, you know, giving responses to other questions, right? And that's fine.
What you want to do is ask a question, so you'll start with something softball by, who are you? Where did you live? It gets somebody actually like doing the small talky things that are necessary to establish rapport as a human being. And I'll provide an example list of questions if you want, because this is still kind of a bit high level. And then we'll get into, how did you find us?
And what were you looking for when you were trying to find us? So take me back to the very beginning of the purchase. And then you try and go chronologically through to the moment where they're starting to get value, and they might be enthusiastically recommending you. That's essentially what the overall question list looks like. When they tell you something, you should be actively listening and reflecting back things that they're saying.
So if they tell you something that might be interesting about where they were when they were trying to make a purchase, you really do want to reflect that back and ask further questions because you have them on the line and you don't want to come off of the interview with like, wait a minute, what do they mean by that? And then you would have to like email them again or speculate with the rest of the team. That's not a good way to run an interview. You have somebody, and that also shows that you're really like listening to what they're doing and that you're enthusiastically trying to reflect this back. I am a very analytical person just by default.
I majored in math in college and I work in the tech industry, right? So I think that having that sort of warmth with a stranger is something that never came naturally to me personally. And as a result, the whole process of running the interview really involves looking within to know that you are trying to like enthusiastically connect with a person. I think often of, I'm gonna butcher the specifics of the quote, but Anthony Bourdain once said that when he goes to a restaurant he automatically sets himself up in the mindset that the restaurant's going to be amazing and he's going to have a lovely time there. Because if he does the opposite, if he's like miserable that day, just got rained on, or it's Anthony Bourdain so he's probably traveling around the world and he's severely jet-lagged or whatever have you, yeah you're not gonna have a good time.
You're already setting yourself up to not have a good time. So I come in, and the mindset that I have is this person is awesome, and they're going to have something interesting to tell me. And I mean that not even as somebody who's mining insight in the tech industry, I mean that as a person. I think about it like you're literally going to some sort of speed dating event, or a small talk event, or whatever, or a networking event, and you are trying to understand the sack of consciousness that's on the other side of the table from you. And so running that interview involves really a different mindset than when you're going to get on a meeting with another client or when you're you know even talking with another person that's a close friend right you need to be comfortable first and then you need to make them comfortable because the more comfortable you make them and the more relatable you make yourself and the safer of a container you make the interview the more likely it is that you're going to get insights that really drive the truth right and really gets the center of who they are.
I love beginning an interview by saying that I'm independent from the rest of the team and I have a direct line to the CEO, I'm here to fix stuff and you can't hurt my feelings. So if they have feedback that might be of a negative nature, then they feel safe providing that. Because they don't want to hurt a person. If you say, hey, your product sucks, or hey, I had this customer support disaster, then you might be more willing to hold back. Or this thing didn't quite work for me.
But that's the thing that you're doing to actually help the business. You're never gonna understand how things actually work better if you're not operating from a place of humility and receptiveness. And yeah, that means you need to pull off all of your armor and actually just talk to the person, right? And we're all lousy at that, man. I'm lousy at that.
If I think about the amount of armor I have, when I go outside every day and talk to a person existing in as low trust of a society as the United States, putting myself in the right mindset to run interviews like this is very hard. It's very hard. So keeping that in mind as you're going through and running this, making sure that you're diverting from your list of questions, trying to get back to that list of questions, and reading the room. You will get a handful of types of person as you are going through and doing this. The ideal ones are people who actually make this kind of a back-and-forth conversation.
Others might have agendas of their own. Sometimes you get people who treat you as the customer support department and they tell you about a disaster that they had. Maybe useful on a one-off, not great for an interview. You might get a power user who literally like you get on the phone and they're like oh I wrote up a whole thing if they prepared for the interview just sit back and let it wash over you man and that happens I get like a few a month where I get somebody who like provided a presentation and all they wanted to do was explain the presentation at me and dramatically read something and I'm like, alright, well go off. But again, that's why you're interviewing usually five to seven people in a given round.
As far as synthesis is concerned, you're going to go and transcribe these interviews, save recordings of all the interviews. I go back and watch all of them. I write down really key quotes from people. Sometimes they give me a quote that works really really well as an H1 and I use that and it works out really well. The synthesis for interviewing is quite similar to what you do with usability testing, but I really talk about, like, in bullet points who they are, what they do, and I try and summarize the interviews as impartially as possible and then provide takeaways.
You get so much insight from even just one excellent interview. It is staggering, and if you've never done it before, I'm so excited for you to try and start. There are a few books that I recommend to people that are pretty evergreen around this. One is by Nate Bolt and Tony Tulletimute. It is called Remote Research and it talks about running on-site recruitment and overall Q&A screeners, stuff like that.
It does a lot on the recruitment side of things that we didn't talk about today that might be useful for you, and it talks a lot about kind of the overall Q&A process. The real deep dive in Q&A is Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal, super, super useful evergreen book. And then Erica Hall's Just Enough Research goes into other research methods in addition to interviews, but really covers a lot on the side of interviews as well. Really large books, Alan Cooper's About Face, Kim Goodwin's Designing for the Digital Age are both really useful texts that kind of summarize all of UX design in a nutshell. And that's interviews.
So if you have any other questions about this, definitely reach out. But really it starts with recruitment, defining the right questions, and then just listening and getting yourself in the right mindset and being receptive to what they have to say. And then taking what they have to say and adapting the business to meet their needs because you're there to serve the customer. That's what a business is supposed to do.
I'm going to talk about the single most powerful and profitable part of this course, which is talking to people. Sounds easy. We talk to people all the time. We talk to our clients, our co-workers, our customers. But I don't think we do it like this.
And we don't do it in a way that tries to identify and isolate the expensive problems in a business. And we certainly don't do it in a way that's more narrative and emotional. I think that when I bring up things like emotions and feelings with my clients, they get very cringe about it. They're like, really? Really?
That's gonna do the thing? Because they want results. They want like hard, actionable things. And we'll get to the hard, actionable things. This yields hard, actionable things.
And it's one of the hardest parts of this entire course. I, in many ways, believe that I am still a student of interviewing. And I've been doing it consistently for almost 20 years now. So if you think you're bad at this or you end up bombing an interview or you end up with something disastrous, like man I have been there. I have been there so hard.
And you'll be there too, and that's okay. You dust yourself off, you figure it out. We're all figuring it out. We're all figuring out how to human. Sometimes you just get weirdos on the line, man.
I don't even know, right? And so there's always ways to refine a process. There's always new insights that you can possibly gather. And this is kind of the state of the art right now. I could give an entire workshop on how to interview.
And so when I did this initially as kind of a live workshop, I didn't talk about interviews at all. And that was because the only way to really comprehensively answer this is with five hours of talking. And we don't have five hours of talking. We have however long this is going to take. So keep that in mind when we're going through all of this.
At the end, I'll be providing some books that you should read as additional resources that will help you out a little bit. But ultimately, we're all trying to figure it out, and this is where the actual bread and butter is of the work that we do. It's the center of our practice. Truly, interviewing is the center of our design practice. It's the center of design, really understanding what people are trying to tell you they need, and responding to those needs.
When people tell you something, believe them. So the first thing that we do is recruit people. Recruitment is a pretty hard component of interviews, and I think the fact that it's necessarily the thing that has to happen first discourages a lot of people from doing it properly. There are a handful of ways you can possibly recruit people. One of them is by going into your past orders database, pulling down the most recent orders, filtering out anything that doesn't fit a certain set of criteria, like maybe the order was refunded or returned or never delivered or it hasn't arrived yet.
You want to be recruiting people who are starting to get value from your product. So there might be people who haven't completed an onboarding process, stuff like that. Filter out all that stuff. You want the meat of people who are recently starting to get value with the product. Because that's one of the peak moments of emotion after they make the purchase, and it's one of the peak moments of recollection as to what actually drove them to come and buy from you.
And you really, really, really wanna know that. You wanna make sure it's worth their time. So I email people when I'm actually recruiting and I tell them, hey, I'm an interviewer, researcher from this company, or a designer with this company. And we chat with people roughly every month or every quarter to get a sense of their needs. If you sign up with us, we'll have a $50 gift card worth your time, and I either send them an Amazon gift card, or I give them a discount code at whatever the business is, and then they come through and say, yes, I'd love to do this.
And I say, great, here's a scheduling link. So Calendly is like the big one, but there are a million scheduling bits of software. I think Cal.com is one. I use Fantastical, which works great with Apple devices. And then you get people on the phone, you follow up the day before, tell them what to expect, ask them to be in a quiet place, say that they need a stable internet connection, and then they do the interview, and it's great, right?
So that's another side of recruitment that really definitely matters, and you want to make sure you're kind of cat herding before they get on, and giving some space before and after the interview in your own scheduling so that you can decompress and write up things. I always keep a notepad in front of me, I always keep the interview recording, and then I'm able to actually go in and run it. You want to know what the agitator was that created the need? In business school parlance, this is called Jobs to be Done, and it's a thing pioneered by a business school professor named Clayton Christensen that basically says that products of all kinds are hired to do a certain job. Like this microphone, I have hired it as its own tiny little employee for me to talk into and sound good, right?
And you do this with everything. You do this with the computer that's recording this. You do this with the phone that I'm using to connect with my friends and family and live my life. And this happens writ large and writ small with various levels of emotional investment. So when you're going through and defining questions for the interview, you really want to know where was somebody and what were they thinking when they decided to start researching for the product.
What did researching for the product actually look like? Were they vetting competitors alongside you? Why did they choose to go with you? Have they encountered any sort of things that held them back from their purchase? What held them back as they were actually onboarding with the product?
Was it confusing for them to start getting value? Now, when I'm writing out questions for an interview, I am not going through that list in a wooden fashion and being like, and now, question six. That is a horrible way to run an interview. An interview is an unfolding, adaptive conversation with a customer, because they may lead you into places that you didn't expect yourself. So if you're trying to control the interview, like maniacally so, it's not going to go well with you because you're also not going to get a really comfortable person.
So you're defining these questions, yes. But you are also going to be deviating from the list of questions. I sometimes only write out six or seven questions for an interview. Sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter, sometimes people answer it just by, you know, giving responses to other questions, right? And that's fine.
What you want to do is ask a question, so you'll start with something softball by, who are you? Where did you live? It gets somebody actually like doing the small talky things that are necessary to establish rapport as a human being. And I'll provide an example list of questions if you want, because this is still kind of a bit high level. And then we'll get into, how did you find us?
And what were you looking for when you were trying to find us? So take me back to the very beginning of the purchase. And then you try and go chronologically through to the moment where they're starting to get value, and they might be enthusiastically recommending you. That's essentially what the overall question list looks like. When they tell you something, you should be actively listening and reflecting back things that they're saying.
So if they tell you something that might be interesting about where they were when they were trying to make a purchase, you really do want to reflect that back and ask further questions because you have them on the line and you don't want to come off of the interview with like, wait a minute, what do they mean by that? And then you would have to like email them again or speculate with the rest of the team. That's not a good way to run an interview. You have somebody, and that also shows that you're really like listening to what they're doing and that you're enthusiastically trying to reflect this back. I am a very analytical person just by default.
I majored in math in college and I work in the tech industry, right? So I think that having that sort of warmth with a stranger is something that never came naturally to me personally. And as a result, the whole process of running the interview really involves looking within to know that you are trying to like enthusiastically connect with a person. I think often of, I'm gonna butcher the specifics of the quote, but Anthony Bourdain once said that when he goes to a restaurant he automatically sets himself up in the mindset that the restaurant's going to be amazing and he's going to have a lovely time there. Because if he does the opposite, if he's like miserable that day, just got rained on, or it's Anthony Bourdain so he's probably traveling around the world and he's severely jet-lagged or whatever have you, yeah you're not gonna have a good time.
You're already setting yourself up to not have a good time. So I come in, and the mindset that I have is this person is awesome, and they're going to have something interesting to tell me. And I mean that not even as somebody who's mining insight in the tech industry, I mean that as a person. I think about it like you're literally going to some sort of speed dating event, or a small talk event, or whatever, or a networking event, and you are trying to understand the sack of consciousness that's on the other side of the table from you. And so running that interview involves really a different mindset than when you're going to get on a meeting with another client or when you're you know even talking with another person that's a close friend right you need to be comfortable first and then you need to make them comfortable because the more comfortable you make them and the more relatable you make yourself and the safer of a container you make the interview the more likely it is that you're going to get insights that really drive the truth right and really gets the center of who they are.
I love beginning an interview by saying that I'm independent from the rest of the team and I have a direct line to the CEO, I'm here to fix stuff and you can't hurt my feelings. So if they have feedback that might be of a negative nature, then they feel safe providing that. Because they don't want to hurt a person. If you say, hey, your product sucks, or hey, I had this customer support disaster, then you might be more willing to hold back. Or this thing didn't quite work for me.
But that's the thing that you're doing to actually help the business. You're never gonna understand how things actually work better if you're not operating from a place of humility and receptiveness. And yeah, that means you need to pull off all of your armor and actually just talk to the person, right? And we're all lousy at that, man. I'm lousy at that.
If I think about the amount of armor I have, when I go outside every day and talk to a person existing in as low trust of a society as the United States, putting myself in the right mindset to run interviews like this is very hard. It's very hard. So keeping that in mind as you're going through and running this, making sure that you're diverting from your list of questions, trying to get back to that list of questions, and reading the room. You will get a handful of types of person as you are going through and doing this. The ideal ones are people who actually make this kind of a back-and-forth conversation.
Others might have agendas of their own. Sometimes you get people who treat you as the customer support department and they tell you about a disaster that they had. Maybe useful on a one-off, not great for an interview. You might get a power user who literally like you get on the phone and they're like oh I wrote up a whole thing if they prepared for the interview just sit back and let it wash over you man and that happens I get like a few a month where I get somebody who like provided a presentation and all they wanted to do was explain the presentation at me and dramatically read something and I'm like, alright, well go off. But again, that's why you're interviewing usually five to seven people in a given round.
As far as synthesis is concerned, you're going to go and transcribe these interviews, save recordings of all the interviews. I go back and watch all of them. I write down really key quotes from people. Sometimes they give me a quote that works really really well as an H1 and I use that and it works out really well. The synthesis for interviewing is quite similar to what you do with usability testing, but I really talk about, like, in bullet points who they are, what they do, and I try and summarize the interviews as impartially as possible and then provide takeaways.
You get so much insight from even just one excellent interview. It is staggering, and if you've never done it before, I'm so excited for you to try and start. There are a few books that I recommend to people that are pretty evergreen around this. One is by Nate Bolt and Tony Tulletimute. It is called Remote Research and it talks about running on-site recruitment and overall Q&A screeners, stuff like that.
It does a lot on the recruitment side of things that we didn't talk about today that might be useful for you, and it talks a lot about kind of the overall Q&A process. The real deep dive in Q&A is Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal, super, super useful evergreen book. And then Erica Hall's Just Enough Research goes into other research methods in addition to interviews, but really covers a lot on the side of interviews as well. Really large books, Alan Cooper's About Face, Kim Goodwin's Designing for the Digital Age are both really useful texts that kind of summarize all of UX design in a nutshell. And that's interviews.
So if you have any other questions about this, definitely reach out. But really it starts with recruitment, defining the right questions, and then just listening and getting yourself in the right mindset and being receptive to what they have to say. And then taking what they have to say and adapting the business to meet their needs because you're there to serve the customer. That's what a business is supposed to do.
Nick Disabato