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The Importance of Interviewing in Design

User Insight in the Design Process

When to Use Interviewing

To Interview Well, One Must Study

The Impact of Interviewing

Summary

This is a great time for the design researcher. Within user-experience design, service design, and to a lesser extent, industrial design, user research has gone from being an outsider activity, to being tolerated, to being the norm. Across industry events, conferences, online forums, school curricula, and professional practice, there’s a tacit agreement that designing for the user is the preferred way to think about design. As with any generalization, there are exceptions. Maybe you aren’t feeling the love right now, but you probably can agree that things are much better than they were in the past. To design for users, you must begin with a deep understanding of users. If you don’t already have that understanding, you need to do some form of user research.

TIP YOU ARE NOT YOUR USER

You may be a user, but be careful of being seduced into designing for yourself. Jared Spool calls that “self design” and identifies the benefits and risks at www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/07/22/uietips-self-design/. I think he’s too easy on self design. Lots of niche companies make the snowboards, outdoor equipment, and mixing gear that they, as enthusiasts, would want. But some have trouble expanding their offering in an innovative way, because they are so caught up in being the user.

NOTE GAINING INSIGHT VS. PERSUADING THE ORGANIZATION

While doing ethnographic research in Japan, I sat with my clients while they conducted another study. They brought users into a facility and showed them the most elegantly designed forms for printer ink cartridges. They were smooth, teardrop shapes that were shiny and coated with the color of the ink. They also showed users the existing ink cartridges: black rectangles with text-heavy stickers.

Can you guess what the research revealed? Of course. People loved the new designs, exclaiming enthusiastically and caressing them. Regardless of methodology, there was no insight to be gained here. I’ve gone back and forth about whether this was good research or bad research. It didn’t reveal new information, but it provided tangible evidence to persuade someone else in the organization. This team’s approach suggests that there are other issues with their design process, and while their research might have been the best solution in that situation, ideally this isn’t the best use of a research study.