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User Research: Contextual Interviews

Market research has taken many forms through the years. Some may immediately think of the kind of focus group shown in the TV show Mad Men. Others may think of large surveys, and still others may have conducted empathy research when using a design thinking approach to product and service design, which I’ll define later in this chapter.

While focus groups, surveys, and empathy interviews can be great tools to get to what people are saying, and maybe some of what they are doing, they don’t get to the why behind these behaviors. Nor do they get us the level of detail in analysis we would like to have to meaningfully influence product and service design decisions.

In this chapter, I’ll recommend a different take on market research that combines watching and interviewing people in their typical work or play, and interviewing them. If you’ve done some qualitative studies before, you might have a fair bit of interesting data to work with already. And if you don’t have that data, collecting it is within your grasp. What I’m proposing is designed so that anyone can conduct the research—no psychology PhDs or white lab coats required. It may be very familiar to my UX, psychology, and anthropology readers: it’s called a contextual interview.

Why Choose a Contextual Interview?

If I had to get to the essence of what a contextual interview is, I’d say “looking over someone’s shoulder and asking questions,” with a focus on observing customers where they do their work (e.g., at their desks at the office, or at the checkout counter) or where they live and play.

The number one reason digital products take longer getting to market and cost more than planned is a mismatch between user needs and functionality. We need to know what our customers’ needs are. Unfortunately, we can’t learn what we need simply asking by them. There are several reasons why this is the case.

First, customers often just want to keep doing what they’re doing, but better. As product and service designers who are outside that day-to-day grind, we can sometimes envision possibilities beyond today’s status quo and leapfrog to a completely different, more efficient, or more pleasurable paradigm. It is not a customer’s job to envision what’s possible in the future; it’s ours!

Second, there are a lot of nuanced behaviors people do unconsciously. When we watch people work or play in the moment, we can see some of the problems with an experience or identify things that don’t make sense—that customers compensate for without realizing it. How likely is it that customers are going to be able to report behaviors they themselves aren’t even aware of?

For example, I’ve observed Millennials flipping wildly between apps to connect with their peers socially. They never reported flipping back and forth between apps, and I don’t think they were always conscious of what they were doing. Without actively observing them in the moment, I might never have known about this behavior, which turned out to be critical to the products my team was designing.

We also want to see the amazing lengths to which “superusers”—users of your products and services who really need them—go in order to make existing (flawed) systems work. We’ll talk about this later, but this notion of watching people “in the moment” is similar to what those in the Lean Startup movement call GOOB, or Getting Out Of (the) Building, to truly see the context in which your users are living.

Third, if your customers are not “in the moment,” they often forget all the important details that are critical to creating successful product and service experiences. Memory is highly contextual. For example, I am confident that when you visit somewhere you haven’t been in years (e.g., your old elementary school), you will remember things about your childhood that you wouldn’t have otherwise because the context triggers those memories. The same is true of customers and their recollections.

In psychology or anthropology circles, watching people to learn how they work is not a new idea at all. Corporations are starting to catch on; it’s becoming more common for companies to have a “research anthropologist” on their staff who studies how people are living, communicating, and working. (Fun fact: There is even one researcher that calls herself a cyborg anthropologist! Given how much we rely on our mobile devices, perhaps we all are cyborgs, and we all practice cyborg anthropology!)

Jan Chipchase, founder and director of human behavioral research group Studio D, brought prominence to the anthropological side of research through his research for Nokia. Through in-person investigation, which he calls “stalking with permission” (see, it’s not just me!), he discovered an ingenious and off-the-grid banking system that Ugandans had created for sharing mobile phones.

I never could have designed something as elegant and as totally in tune with the local conditions as this. … If we’re smart, we’ll look at [these innovations] that are going on, and we’ll figure out a way to enable them to inform and infuse both what we design and how we design.

Jan Chipchase, “The Anthropology of Mobile Phones,” TED Talk, March 2007

Chipchase’s approach uses classic anthropology as a tool for building products and thinking from a business perspective. I’ll now explain how you can do this, too.

Empathy Research: Understanding What the User Really Needs

Chipchase’s work is just one example of how we can only understand what the user really needs through stepping into their shoes—or ideally, their minds—for a little while.

Leave Assumptions at the Door and Embrace Another’s Reality

You need to start by dispelling your (and your company’s) assumptions about what your customers need and begin thinking like them instead. In its Human-Centered Design Toolkit, IDEO writes that the first step to design thinking is empathy research, or a “deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for.”

In my own work, I’ve been immersed in the worlds of people who create new drugs, traders managing billion-dollar funds, organic goat farmers, YouTube video stars, and people who need to buy many millions of dollars’ worth of “shotcrete” (like concrete, but it can be pumped) to build skyscrapers. Over and over, I’ve found that the more I’m able to think like these people, the better I’m able to identify opportunities and optimize product and service designs.

Suppose, however, that you were the customer in the past (or worse yet, your boss was the customer decades ago). You and/or your boss might think you know exactly what customers want and need, making research unnecessary. Wrong! You are not the customer, and when you do research in this context it can make it even harder because you must fight against preconceived notions to be able to listen to customers about their needs today.

I remember one client who in the past had been the target customer for his products—before the advent of smartphones. Imagine being at a construction site and purchasing concrete 10 years ago, around the time of flip phones (if you were lucky!). The world has changed so much since then, and surely the way we purchase concrete has, too. This is why it is important to park your expectations at the door, embrace your customer’s reality, and live today’s challenges.

Here’s just one example I noticed while securing a moving truck permit. To give me the permit, the government employee I worked with had to walk to one end of this huge office to get a form, walk all the way over to the opposite corner to stamp it with an official seal, walk nearly as far over to the place where they could photocopy it, and then bring it to me. Meanwhile, the line behind me got longer and longer. Seeing this inefficient process left me wondering why these three items weren’t grouped together. It’s an example of the unexpected improvements you can discover just through watching people at work. I’m not sure the government worker even noticed the inefficiencies!

Moments like these abound in our everyday lives. Stop and think for a second about a clunky system you’ve witnessed. Perhaps it was the payment system on the subway? Your health care portal? An app? What could have made the process smoother for you? Once you start observing, you’ll find it hard to stop. Trust me. Your kids, friends, and relatives will need to be patient with you and your “helpful hints” from here on out!

Any Interview Can Be Contextual

Because so much of memory is contextual and there are so many things our customers will do that are unconscious, we can learn a great deal we wouldn’t otherwise when we are immersed in their worlds. That means meeting with farmers in the middle of Pennsylvania, sitting with traders in front of their big banks of screens on Wall Street, having happy hour with high-net-worth jet-setters near the ocean (darn!), observing folks who do tax research in their windowless offices, or even chatting with Millennials at their organic avocado toast joints. The key point is, they’re all doing what they normally do.

Contextual interviews allow the researcher to see workers’ Post-its on their desks, what piles of paper are active and what piles are gathering dust, how many times they’re interrupted, and what kind of processes they actually follow (which are often different than the ones that they might describe during a traditional interview). Your product or service has to be useful and delightful for your customer, which means you need to observe them and how they work. The more immersive and closer to their actual day this experience is, the better (Figure 8-1).

Figure 8-1

Observing how a small business owner is organizing their business

In contextual interviews, while I want to be quiet sometimes and just observe, I also ask my research subjects questions like:

• What would I need to know to be successful at your job (e.g., if I took over when you were sick)?
• Where would I get started?
• What would I have to keep in mind?
• What could go wrong?
• What drives you crazy sometimes?

What researchers notice

Researchers who do contextual interviews typically consider the following:

Artifacts

What’s on the desk (Figure 8-2)? What papers, files, spreadsheets, etc. does this person use to keep track of everything? What else is nearby in the environment?

Communication

How is work communicated or reviewed (email, software, discussion, etc.)? How many other people are working with the customer?

Interruptions

What are the interruptions in the customer’s job? How often are these? Do they frequently need to move around? What’s the noise level like? How many times is their mobile phone interrupting them? Are they constantly hearing loud overhead announcements about the Dow Jones index? (This last example was actually the case for some stock traders I observed. Their workplace was already so loud and stressful that what they needed from my client was essentially an “easy button” that was simple and made their jobs easier.)

Related factors

What other jobs does this person do in addition to the one you are officially observing? How many programs do they have to use on their computer? Are they always on the computer? Are they using their mobile phone?

Figure 8-2

Example of the desk of a research participant (why do they have the psychology book Influence right in the middle, I wonder?)

Why Not Surveys or Usability Test Findings? Discovering the What versus the Why

Clients sometimes assure me that their user research is solid and they need no other data because they’ve received thousands of survey responses. It is true that this data will give the client an accurate reading of the what of the immediate problem (e.g., the customer wants a faster system, step three of a process is problematic, or the mobile app is cumbersome). But as product and service designers, we need to get to the why of the problem: the underlying reasons and rationale behind the what.

It could be that the customer is overwhelmed by the appearance of an interface, or was expecting something different, or is confused by the language you’re using. It could be a hundred different things. It is extremely hard to infer the underlying root cause of an issue from a survey or by talking to your colleagues who built the product or service. We can only determine why customers are thinking the way they are by meeting them and observing them in context.

As an example, take a look at the usability test findings in Figure 8-3. Can you tell why these participants are having trouble “Navigating from Code” in the fourth set of bars? (Me neither!) Classic usability test findings often provide the same what information. They will tell you that your users were good at some tasks and bad at others, but often won’t provide the clues you need to get to the why. This is where conducting research using the Six Minds comes to the rescue.

Figure 8-3

Usability test findings by task

Recommended Approach for Contextual Interviews and Their Analysis

As I’ve implied throughout this chapter, shadowing people in the context of their actual work allows you to observe explicit behaviors as well as implicit nuances that your interviewees may not even be aware of. The more that users show you their processes step by step, the more accurate they will be when it comes to reacalling those processes.

With our Six Minds of Experience, I want you to not just experience the situation in context, but also be actively thinking about the many different types of mental representations within your customer’s mind:

Vision/Attention

What are they paying attention to? What are they searching for? Why?

Wayfinding

How are they navigating their existing products and services? How do they believe they should interact with them?

Language

What words do they use? What does that suggest about their level of expertise?

Memory

What assumptions are they making about how things should work? When are they surprised and confused?

Decision Making

What do they say they are trying to accomplish? What does that say about how they are framing the problem? What decisions are they making? What “blockers” are getting in the way?

Emotion

What are their goals? What are they worried about? How might future products or services be better suited to their needs, expectations, desires, and goals?

The sort of observation I’ve described so far has mostly focused on how people work, but it can work equally well in the consumer space. Depending on what your end product or service is, your research might include observing a family watching TV at home (with their permission, of course), going shopping at the mall with them, or enjoying happy hour or a coffee with their friends. Trust me: you’ll have many stories to tell about all the things your customers do that you didn’t expect when you return to the office!

This is probably the most fun part, and shouldn’t be creepy if you do it correctly. I give you permission (and the participants should provide their or their parents’ written permission) to be nosy and curious, and suggest you really question all your existing assumptions. When I’m hiring someone, I often ask them if they like to go to an outdoor cafe and just people-watch. Because that’s my kind of researcher: we’re totally fascinated by what people are thinking, what they’re doing, and why. Why is that person here? Why are they dressed the way they are? Where are they going next? What are they thinking about? What makes them tick? What would make them laugh?

There are some terrific whole books dedicated to contextual interviews, which I’ll mention at the end of this chapter. I’ll leave it to them to provide all the nuances about these interviews, but I definitely want you to go into your meetings with the following mindset:

You are there to learn and observe

That means you need to blend in, not be the star attraction (your customer is), ask open-ended questions, and leave your assumptions, perspectives, and opinions at the door. Imagine that you are an actor learning to play their role, or that you will be taking over for your customer during maternity/paternity leave—you would never tell them they’re wrong, or show them how to do something. You want to learn how to do things their way and think like them.

Follow their customs

Try to dress in a way that is commensurate with your audience, so you are neither intimidating nor stand out. Your goal is to blend in and not influence the situation. If they take off their shoes at the door, so should you. Be ready to sit on the floor, or eat pizza straight from the box.

Try to adopt their language

In other words, try not to be more technical, even if you know more about a subject. Try not to use your company’s in-house jargon. In fact, do the opposite—ask the customers what they would call a concept or action and use those terms before you use your words.

Ask why

While sometimes people rationalize and have implicit reasons for an activity, it is always interesting to see what they come up with. Often it helps to understand how they are framing a problem or decision, and get clues about their underlying assumptions.

Try to minimize your influence on their actions

It is very hard for someone who is building a product or service not to demonstrate, teach, or promote when they know their product has the perfect feature that could help. That is not your role. (At least, not yet!) You need to observe the customer’s perspective, no matter how tough it may be for you to watch. You need to know the reality on the ground.

Make sure you observe them in action

Many times, if you’re meeting someone at an office, they’ll want to meet in a conference room. While perhaps that would be more comfortable, it’s preferable to huddle around their desk and observe them in action in their native environment. Crucially, you want to see them doing the things you seek to improve through your products or services.

Only bring a few people to the contextual interview

One to three is an ideal number. Try to have a small footprint. You do not want your customers to feel like they have an audience, and have to perform for the group. And you don’t want the size of the group following them around to constrian their normal activities.

Record information in subtle ways

Do I love to get video and audio recordings? Absolutely! Do I bring along lights and boom poles and fancy mics? No! Bring a wireless mic that the person will forget they are wearing, a compact prosumer video camera, and your cell phone (for pictures). It is a good sign when someone answers the telephone or walks out of the office to ask a colleague a question, because they are following their normal routine and not being polite to you.

Bring a notebook, not a computer

You want to write notes immediately and not worry about time booting up or connecting to WiFi. And I say this from experience: bring an extra pen! One of your colleagues from the office who is following along will forget.

Ask them about themselves, and their perspective

How long have you been doing this? How did you get started? What do you like about the job? What do you do when you are not here? What do you hope to achieve? What makes you happiest? As the observer, you want to be able to see the world through your participants’ eyes and understand what makes them tick. Start with normal, socially acceptable questions (e.g., How did you get started in this job?) and gradually get to deeper questions (e.g., What is most important to you in life? What would make you feel accomplished/happy/satisfied?).

Common Questions

Here are some questions that often come up when people are getting started with contextual interviews:

How many people do I need to interview?

Generally I try to estimate the appropriate number of user groups according to their lifestyle or role (e.g., I might interview middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college undergraduates in an academic setting, or in a medical setting I might want to interview general practitioners, specialists, nurses, and administrators). You want about 8 to 12 people per group to identify trends. However, if reality and the ideal clash, remember that any amount is always better than zero!

How long should the contextual interviews be?

I encourage 90-minute interviews. Young kids might not last that long, and busy doctors may refuse that duration. In other cases, you can “ride along” for longer periods (e.g., a morning or afternoon). You want a long enough duration to observe participants’ typical pattern of activities and talk to them about themselves and their perspective.

How do I recruit participants?

I encourage you to use a professional recruiting service. The time it takes to schedule, remind, reschedule, discuss, prescreen, etc., is far more than you’d imagine if you have never done it before. Recruiters can be well worth the money (and freedom from aggravation). If you choose to recruit on your own and are looking for professionals, start with associations. For the general public, you’d be surprised how far networking and Craigslist can get you. However, when you are flying around the country to conduct interviews, the cost of professional recruitment can be well worth avoiding the situation of getting there and having no one to interview.

Should I have a set of questions prepared?

Yes, but… I encourage you to “go with the flow” of the interviewee. There is a balance to be struck between having participants stay on task and not taking them too far from their standard way of working or living. Don’t think of a contextual interview as something for which you need to fill out a form and have every blank filled. Rather, think of it as getting the information you need to step into their world. Often you’ll find the conversation heads naturally to what they know, how they frame a problem, and what they value in life. There will be different types of people, and thus it is important to have multiple interviews to define customer segments.

From Data to Insights

Many people get stuck at this step. They have interviewed a set of customers and feel overwhelmed by all of their findings, quotes, images, and videos. Is it really possible to learn what we need to know just through these observations? All these nuanced observations that you’ve gathered can be overwhelming if not organized correctly. Where should you begin?

To distill hundreds of data points into valuable insights on how you should shape your product or service, you need to identify patterns and trends. To do so, you need the right organizational pattern. Here’s what my process looks like.

Step 1: Review and Write Down Observations

In reviewing my own notes and video recordings, I’ll pull out bite-sized quotes and insights on users’ actions (aka, my “findings”). I write these onto Post-it notes (or on virtual stickies in a tool like Mural or RealTimeBoard). What counts as an observation? Anything that might be relevant to our Six Minds:

Vision/Attention

What are they paying attention to?

Wayfinding

What is their perception of space, and how to move around in that space?

Memory

What are their perspectives on the world?

Language

What are the words they use?

Decision Making

How are they framing the problem? What are they really trying to solve (deeper need)? What “blockers” are getting in the way?

Emotion

What are they worried about? What are their biggest goals?

In addition, if there are social interactions that are important (e.g., how the boss works with employees), I’ll write those down as well (Figure 8-4).

Figure 8-4

Example of findings from contextual interviews

Step 2: Organize Each Participant’s Findings into the Six Minds

After doing this for each of my participants, I place all the sticky notes up on a wall, organized by participant. I then align them into six columns, one for each of the Six Minds (Figure 8-5). A comment like “Can’t find the ‘save for later’ feature” might be placed in the Vision/Attention column, whereas “Wants to know right away if this site accepts PayPal” might be filed as Decision Making. Much more detail on this will follow in the next few chapters.

Figure 8-5

Getting ready to organize findings into the Six Minds

If you try out this method, you’ll inevitably find some overlap; this is completely to be expected. To make this exercise useful for you, however, I’d like you to determine what the most important component of an insight is for you as the designer, and categorize it as such. Is the biggest problem visual design? Interaction design? Is the language sophisticated enough? Is it the right frame of reference? Are you providing people with the right tools to solve the problems that they encounter along the way to a bigger decision? Are you upsetting them in some way?

Step 3: Look for Trends Across Participants and Create an Audience Segmentation

In Part III of this book we will talk about audience segmentation. If you look for trends across groups of participants, you’ll observe trends and commonalities across findings, which can provide important insights about the future direction for your products and services. Separating your findings into the Six Minds can also help you manage product improvements. You can give the decision-making feedback to your UI expert who worked on the flow, the vision/attention feedback to your graphic designer, and so on. The end result will be a better experience for your users.

In the next few chapters, I’ll give some concrete examples from real participants I observed in an ecommerce study. I want you to be able to identify what might count as an interesting data point and to think about some of the nuances that you can get from the insights you collect.

Exercise

In my online classes on the Six Minds, I provide participants with a small set of data I’ve appropriated from actual research participants (though somewhat fictionalized so I don’t give away trade secrets).

In Figures 8-8 through 8-13 are the notes from six participants in an ecommerce research study. They were asked to make purchasing decisions and were either seeking a favorite item, or selecting an online movie for purchase and viewing. The focus of the study was on searching for and selecting the item (the checkout was not a focus of the study). The following notes reflect the findings collected during contextual interviews.

Challenge: Please put each of the notes about the study in the most appropriate category in Figure 8-7 (Vision, Wayfinding, etc.).

Feeling stuck? Perhaps Figure 8-6 can help.

Figure 8-6

The Six Minds of Experience

If you feel a note should be put in more than one category, you may do so, but try to limit yourself to the most important category. What did you learn about how each individual was thinking? Were there any trends between participants?

Figure 8-7

In which of the Six Minds categories would you place each finding?

Figure 8-8

Findings from participant 1

Figure 8-9

Findings from participant 2

Figure 8-10

Findings from participant 3

Figure 8-11

Findings from participant 4

Figure 8-12

Findings from participant 5

I’ll return to these five participants and provide snippets of that dat set as needed in the following chapters to concretely illustrate some nuances and help you sharpen your analytic swords so that you know how to handle data in different situations.

Can’t wait to complete the exercise and share it with your friends? Great! Please download the Apple Keynote or Microsoft PowerPoint versions to make it easy to complete and share (http://bit.ly/six-minds-exercise).

Concrete Recommendations

• Watch people work in their place of work, rather than just interviewing them (many more contextual memories surface when they’re “in the moment”)
• Watch people complete tasks, not just discuss needs (again, more contextual memories and unconscious behaviors surface this way)
• Try to deduce assumptions about the world that underlie their behavior (allowing yourself to think like the consumer helps you to discover their pain points and issues that you can help with)
• Measure their observable behavior, not just what they say about a topic (How many times are they checking their phone? How many times do they use paper versus. computer?).

Further Reading

Chipchase, J. (2007). “The Anthropology of Mobile Phones” TED Talk. Retrieved January 15, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2Uy9J1A.

Chipchase, J., Lee, P., & Maurer, B. (2011). Mobile Money: Afghanistan. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization. 6(2): 13–33.

IDEO.org. (2015). “The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design.” Retrieved January 15, 2019, from http://www.designkit.org//resources/1.