Paper and Pain’s Post

Transcript

Good morning, everybody, and Happy Painless Friday. My name is Christian. Today's episode, we continue talking about user interviews, what to do, what not to do, and how to make the most of it. This is the third episode and the final installment in this little series. And the first we talked about how to recruit the right users and get the right insights. And the second was all about asking the right questions and things to avoid. And today we're going to discuss follow-up studies and why. Interviews alone are not enough. I like to think of user interviews as just one of the many tools in the shadow of a researcher. And the good research is never done, so we'll follow up. Study is an incredibly important part of the user interview as a method of researching our users. You see, we don't just come up with an idea for an interview out of nowhere. It is born out of necessity. It is there to fill in the gap in knowledge that we have. When we don't know something and want to find out, we go to our users, talk to them to discover the insights and then improve our products and services. But that in and of itself gives birth to more unknowns. So we need to continue learning. And there are lots of things that we can't find out in the interview alone. In fact, if I look at the insides. And the things that make it into products, the qualitative data from the interviews is just one of the elements and incredibly important element that goes into the insights and make sure that we know what we're doing. But it's just one of the elements. It also requires lots of other bits of information to complete the picture. We need to gather some quantitative data. Numbers, figures, stats. We might need some behavioral data. We need to know how our users interact with our product and not just what they say about it. In order for the insights to be complete. We can just run the interview and make decisions based on what our users say. We need to supplement it with all this other information to be sure that we are doing the right thing. I like to think of having lots of different methods available to us in having them complete the interviews before the interview is done and after it's done so that we have a full picture. Running a survey and analyzing large quantitative data helps us identify some patterns, helps us figure out some pain points, and maybe gives us points to discuss with the users. When we interview in people, we like to discuss what they feel, what they think, maybe probe for some future things that we may deliver for them. We might actually want to observe them as they do things, as they navigate our app. We use our service, so we want to immerse ourselves, go into where the users add, watch them as they do things, be a part of the group of users and actually get insights that the users may not be aware of. Sometimes it helps getting into the headspace of the users without actually being there. For example letting them keep a diary of how they navigate your app. This gives you a perception of the user actually sharing how they feel in the moment, not reflecting on how they felt when they were using it in the past or thinking about what they might feel in the future. All of that comes back to the big question of how we plan our research, something that we started this series with and something that we wrapped this series on. It's really important for us to understand what the objective of our research is, why are we running it and what do we want to achieve for our product and our business. So when we frame our ideas, we supplement our decisions with all the data that we discovered O the interview alone may not be enough for us to make a well informed decision. And when we're planning research, it's really important to have different types of data coming together. To make sure that the decisions we make leave best impact possible. Stay tuned for more design insights and Painless. And have a happy Friday.