The skill of establishing a connection and building effective communication without harming yourself is one of the most important qualities of a UX researcher. It enables them to enjoy the process and not feel exhausted or burnt out over the course of time. During an interview, we take on different roles when adjusting to the respondent in order to get deep and high-quality results.
It happens unconsciously, it’s not like you’re starting a meeting thinking:
So, here he is holding his arm like that or his posture is so relaxed, it means I should take the position of a subordinate and appear respectful.
My research team has a lot of experience with usability tests and in-depth interviews. After several years of experience and self-training, we learnt to notice behavioural patterns.
When I do my error analysis with the researchers who conduct in-depth interviews, I always teach them one psychological life-hacks:
To put on/adopt a pupil’s position
What is this pupil’s position?
To put it simply, it’s when you really want to adopt a unique or one-of-a-kind skill or experience and you have a strong, respected and unique expert in front of you. They are your only source of the most useful and deepest knowledge and they only have one hour for you.
Then you take on the role of a person who needs to get the most of it and get the maximum knowledge of the experience from the expert.
You need this meeting to be ultra-efficient, and you have to work through a certain set of topics as deep as it gets. Your goal is to extract the maximum amount of experience, actions and prime causes.
What profit does it give you?
When you learn to put on such a role, you get rid of a whole bunch of problems. You’re engaged in an inner dialogue with yourself:
– I’m afraid to ask them follow-up ‘why?’ questions, I don’t want them to get angry.
– Yes, you’re not a pro in this sphere yet, you’re learning. Asking a lot of questions is good, it shows interest and the importance of the topic.
– They all think I’m an idiot when I ask such basic questions.
– And once again: you’re not an idiot, you’re learning. A teacher’s task is to answer and deliver/get it across, and the pupil’s is to show their gaps so that the teacher could help.
Everything is a bit more complicated
Actually, it’s not just the positions of a pupil and a teacher. With different people, depending on their behaviour, you adopt various ‘learning’ roles. Let me share some of the most memorable examples from my experience.
1. Respecting
Sometimes you’re a little ignoramus, but with a ton of respect to the respondent with such an impressive and unique experience. In this case, you adjust your every question accordingly:
“You have such a unique and rich experience, could you tell me how…”“None of our clients have such a versatile and complex experience as you do…”
At times, this is enough in the first 2–3 questions to break the ice. The respondent relaxes, realising that their authority and experience is valued and that they don’t have to prove themselves to anybody now.
Illustration by Nadya Kharitonova
I’ll never forget one financial expert of a large company. The first five minutes of the interview, instead of answering the questions, he was constantly switching over to how dumb everybody was in our company to have invented such a stupid service (we were researching on behalf of our client, studying the user scenario to detect any open problems and, based on the findings, develop a new product). Oh, and how stupid we were to not ask him about his experience with the service, but about the scenario and problems in some totally different sphere.
The ice broke when we started repeating those phrases at the beginning of every question. He had a change of heart, gave in, felt respected and valued, and turned into such a darling that we managed to get all the information that we needed.
Such cases are challenges for a researcher. When you emerge the victor, you feel like a professional, and that’s a rewarding feeling.
2. Friend on the same side of the fence
Here you’re a friend who can afford to say things that, say, a clerk from a bank or a representative of the service you’re doing research for cannot. You possibly talk about illegitimate things, that some do it and about the law being very strict and preventing entrepreneurs from developing. In the end, you’re almost hugging and patting each other on the shoulder like long-time partners.
Illustration by Nadya Kharitonova
Here I feel reminded of the time I had with one coffee house owner with whom we later exchanged opinions multiple times, shared our experiences, and just bought some good coffee if it happened to be close by. It developed into a good and engaging relationship.
Here, we just shared our problems with merchant acquiring and banks. Everyone who does something by themselves faces the same problems. And actually, it’s a pity, because they shouldn’t suffer. They should just be doing their thing, and not be trying to get rid of the red tape and sort out the problems the service created for them.
We apply these tricks:
“Yes, many say the problem exists and it’s not solved on the market…”“One of our respondents also faced similar consequences…”
Examples from other users’ experiences show that you’re acquainted with the situation, that you’re on their side and trying to help, creating a product that is going to solve their problems. You’re on the same side of the fence. It’s important to them, they’re a fighter and a warrior.
3. Entertainer and a half-asleep child
You still need to get the knowledge and experience out of them. Try not to wake them up with your rough and loud actions. Almost ‘Mission: Impossible’.
Illustration by Nadya Kharitonova
These are very quiet and silent people with whom all the thinking goes inside, and out come only a couple of phrases a minute. Here, you are an entertainer at a children’s party, when the kids are falling asleep — you have to keep entertaining them but you shouldn’t wake them up. You can’t be too loud or attract too much attention, but you need to get a result.
Henceforth, you keep re-phrasing the same question over and over again, just as if you’re casting a fishing line to see what it brings.
“So, has your account ever been blocked? Maybe there were cases when the bank blocked your transfers for no reason? Maybe it happened to you that you log onto the online bank and your accounts appear inactive? Or they’re just inactive or don’t work?”
To your three questions, they’ll respond with just one phrase of several words.
You tried to be slow and considerate. You let them take their time after every question. You watched and waited, without speeding them up. As a result, you’re so exhausted as if you’ve been administering CPR for the last 6 hours.
4. Pupil-navigator
Sometimes, all you have to do is navigate the master onto the right course. They find it interesting to tell you about something they consider important to YOU. They are ready to tell you what should be done and how it should be done. Even if you were actually planning to discuss a totally different topic.
You need to be gentle, but already slightly on top. You’re still learning and your task hasn’t changed. It’s just that you have a teacher with a soaring fantasy.
At university, students would often disrupt physics classes by asking the professor a question, and he would go on and on about the space and galaxies for the rest of the class. We knew it and used the trick to avoid calculating formulas. Only here it’s the other way around. It’s not you who suggests a topic, but the teacher themselves skip to what they consider more important for them or for you.
Illustration by Nadya Kharitonova
Here are some ideas which could work:
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I have a lot of questions…”“To do it more efficiently, let’s move onto the next topic…”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I find it important to understand…”
In this category, I have the largest number of unsuccessful interviews.
The first case was with a young female entrepreneur. My participation in the conversation was limited to only five sentences or questions. But the girl was strong, loud, and just when I’d open my mouth to try to steer the conversation towards the topic I wanted to discuss, she would raise her voice and keep talking. She would talk about what we had to do and what we had to think about. For example, what our end product should look like.
For half an hour, I was trying to steer the interview on the right course and get answers to my questions. Both gently and more actively, appealing to the authority and provoking interest. All my attempts failed.
In such situations, after 20 minutes of trying, you should relax and let the respondent get it off their chest. You should try to relax and not get nervous that things are not working out the way you want it to. After all, the interview has failed, but you did everything you could.Shit happens 😊
Another memorable interview was with an elderly man. Usually, we select people among current users ourselves, but for this study, we commissioned a recruitment agency that was supposed to provide a selection of people with a certain income level per month, per family member.
That elderly man was from a group with the lowest income. It was possible to steer him on the right course, but just for a moment — he would quickly lose the thread and keep telling us about a summer house in Bulgaria.
Then he would talk about deposits worth millions in 12 banks, about a camera for his son which was worth $9000, about how bored he was, and how he lived off the deposits’ interest and did nothing at the time.
That’s how we found out that he liked taking part in such studies to have a chat about himself and brighten up his wealthy life. But he wouldn’t place himself into the low-income group.
If people pursue their own goals when attending an in-depth interview, it’s the most complicated category because they are masters that are not interested in passing any knowledge onto you, but only focused on chatting about other things.
5. Teacher that learns from pupils
You are fully dominating the respondent, although gently. Your teacher is a pupil. Your teacher is very modest, quiet and shy, but kind, nice and sympathetic. They are afraid to offend you, no matter what instructions you give them (about the importance of honest feedback, however harsh it might be).
They are worried about saying something inappropriate, to give any negative feedback. It’s important for them what others might think about them and what ‘aftertaste’ the researcher is going to leave the interview with.
Illustration by Nadya Kharitonova
It’s crucial for the researcher to stay gentle but keep steering. Something which is even more important to show is that you’re just like them, to find that common experience that could bring the two of you closer to each other:
“I don’t understand this interface either, it’s difficult to understand how it works, it’s too complicated and unclear…”“In May, I also went sale shopping in the outlet…”
You can always find something that makes you two alike. Then people slowly relax and start telling you things:
— Oh, I haven’t mentioned it, but this button here and this name over there, I didn’t understand them. I actually find it difficult here…
— Yes, I know all the best outlets in the western district. Do you know how I found them? Let me tell you!
And that’s exactly what we need.
Role models help to achieve results, detect problems, and get to the heart of the underlying reasons for respondents’ behaviour.
It’s key that they are comfortable states and comfortable roles. You get into the roles automatically, without tension and suppressing yourself. You develop this through trial and error, through your personal experiences.
That’s why, just like a therapist listening to his/her patients, a researcher, too, needs a break from interviewing. They also need to discuss what happened or accumulated within the session after an interview.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +431,678 people.
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