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Interviewing users or potential users, is one of the most useful techniques for

gaining insights about people and their needs.

An interview is a method for gathering information, through direct dialogue.

Through this dialogue, product teams can capture feelings, desires, struggles,

delights, and opinions of their audience and potential audience.

The primary benefits of interviewing users are, direct contact.

Interviewers interact with interviewees, in person without using any tool,

service, or product to bypass direct communication.

Communicating directly with interviewees,

significantly reduces chances of misinterpreting collected data.

Challenges perceptions.

Interviewing people, rather than making assumptions about them is powerful.

It creates an unimaginable impact, on product stakeholders, and changes their

beliefs, assumptions and perceptions about what people need, and what motivates them.

Deepens empathy.

Interviewing creates understanding and

human relatedness, in levels that cannot be achieved in any other way.

It helps individuals, teams, and

organizations add a human aspect to what they do.

Builds credibility.

Data collected in interviews, supports quantitative data gathered in other ways,

such as analytics.

It helps explain it, helps you understand its logic, and

provides a solid basis for coming to the right conclusions.

That said, interviewing people carries one great caveat.

That caveat is called rationalization.

Rationalization is a psychological phenomenon, in which we humans,

change the reality we tell others about.

We do that not because we are liars, or

have any bad intentions, the other way around.

We humans want to be perceived as good, friendly, and

helpful, we want to be loved.

Therefore when an interviewer is asking us about something that happened to us,

we will change reality a little bit, sometimes a lot more than a little bit.

Exactly because of that, we want to help, we want the person who

asked us to feel good about the data we provide him or her with, so we lie.

This doesn't happen to some of us, or to people with certain personality traits, or

from different social classes, this is human nature.

The bad news is that,

as an interviewer, you can never tell when rationalization is happening.

There's no way to tell if someone is telling you stories about

things that kind of happened, or never happened.

Later on,

I'll teach you one technique that can help you prevent rationalization but remember,

you'll never be able to identify it, when it happens right in front of your eyes.