Introduction to Interviewing Users

[MUSIC] 0:00 Interviewing users or potential users, is one of the most useful techniques for 0:04 gaining insights about people and their needs. 0:09 An interview is a method for gathering information, through direct dialogue. 0:12 Through this dialogue, product teams can capture feelings, desires, struggles, 0:17 delights, and opinions of their audience and potential audience. 0:22 The primary benefits of interviewing users are, direct contact. 0:28 Interviewers interact with interviewees, in person without using any tool, 0:33 service, or product to bypass direct communication. 0:37 Communicating directly with interviewees, 0:41 significantly reduces chances of misinterpreting collected data. 0:44 Challenges perceptions. 0:49 Interviewing people, rather than making assumptions about them is powerful. 0:51 It creates an unimaginable impact, on product stakeholders, and changes their 0:56 beliefs, assumptions and perceptions about what people need, and what motivates them. 1:01 Deepens empathy. 1:07 Interviewing creates understanding and 1:08 human relatedness, in levels that cannot be achieved in any other way. 1:11 It helps individuals, teams, and 1:16 organizations add a human aspect to what they do. 1:18 Builds credibility. 1:22 Data collected in interviews, supports quantitative data gathered in other ways, 1:24 such as analytics. 1:29 It helps explain it, helps you understand its logic, and 1:31 provides a solid basis for coming to the right conclusions. 1:34 That said, interviewing people carries one great caveat. 1:38 That caveat is called rationalization. 1:43 Rationalization is a psychological phenomenon, in which we humans, 1:46 change the reality we tell others about. 1:51 We do that not because we are liars, or 1:54 have any bad intentions, the other way around. 1:56 We humans want to be perceived as good, friendly, and 2:00 helpful, we want to be loved. 2:03 Therefore when an interviewer is asking us about something that happened to us, 2:06 we will change reality a little bit, sometimes a lot more than a little bit. 2:11 Exactly because of that, we want to help, we want the person who 2:16 asked us to feel good about the data we provide him or her with, so we lie. 2:20 This doesn't happen to some of us, or to people with certain personality traits, or 2:25 from different social classes, this is human nature. 2:30 The bad news is that, 2:34 as an interviewer, you can never tell when rationalization is happening. 2:36 There's no way to tell if someone is telling you stories about 2:41 things that kind of happened, or never happened. 2:44 Later on, 2:47 I'll teach you one technique that can help you prevent rationalization but remember, 2:48 you'll never be able to identify it, when it happens right in front of your eyes. 2:53