Читать книгу Interviewing Users - Steve Portigal - Страница 15

Interviewing creates a shared experience, often a galvanizing one, for the product development team (which can include researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product management, and beyond). In addition to the information we learn from people and the inspiration we gain from meeting them, there’s a whole other set of transformations we go through. You might call it empathy—say a more specific understanding of the experience and emotions of the customer—which might even be as simple as seeing “the user” or “the customer” as a real live person in all their glorious complexity. But what happens when people develop empathy for a series of individuals they might meet in interviews? They experience an increase in their overall capacity for empathy.¹

This evolution in how individual team members view themselves, their design work, and the world around them starts to drive shifts in the organizational culture (see Figure 1.6). This capacity for empathy is not sufficient to change a culture, but it is necessary.

More tactically, these enlightened folks are better advocates for customers and better champions for the findings and implications of what has been learned in interviews.

The wonderful thing about these impacts is that they come for free (or nearly). Being deliberate in your efforts to interview users will pay tremendous dividends for your products, as well as the people who produce it.

FIGURE 1.6 Team experiences that are challenging and out-of-the-ordinary create goodwill and a common sense of purpose.

Summary

It’s become increasingly common, perhaps even required, for companies to include user research in their design and development process. Among many different approaches to user research, interviewing (by whatever name you want to call it) is a deep dive into the lives of customers.

• Interviewing can be used in combination with other techniques, such as identifying key themes through interviews and then validating them quantitatively in a subsequent study.

• At a distance, interviewing looks just like the everyday act of talking to people, but interviewing well is a real skill that takes work to develop.

• Interviewing can reveal new “frames” or models that flip the problem on its head. These new ways of looking at the problem are crucial to identifying new, innovative opportunities.

• Interviewing can be used to help identify what could be designed, to help refine hypotheses about a possible solution that is being considered, or to guide the redesign of an existing product that is already in the marketplace

• Teams who share the experience of meeting their users are enlightened, aligned, and more empathetic.