38. User Interviews (feat. Steve Portigal, Research Consultant and Author)
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This is the Nielsen Norman Group UX Podcast. Welcome to today's episode, which features a conversation between Therese Fassenden and Steve Portigal. Therese and Steve discuss user interviews. They talk about how this research method changed over the years, what the main benefits and biggest challenges are, and towards the end of the episode, Steve gives some practical advice for how to avoid some common mistakes many interviewers make.

Join us as we dive into the conversation with Therese and Steve and explore the art of user interviews. Steve, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to chat with you today about user interviews. It blows my mind that we haven't had an episode on this topic and who better to have on the podcast? Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah. So yeah. And interviews are probably one of the more, if not the most popular methods in UX research, right? After all it's,

If we're going to make better products and services, better experiences, who better to talk to than the people who are going to be using it? I would love to know a bit just to kind of give an introduction for folks who've maybe never done one before, never really even heard of these. What would you say a user interview is? You know, when you look for definitions, you're going to you can start an argument. Well, that doesn't count as this. That doesn't count as that.

So I'll give my kind of sloppy perspective. And I think people may have variations. And I tend to be a little...

generous and what I include as a, as an interview. And I think that sort of the, it's an activity as well as a method, right? So you can do lots of quote unquote methods that still involve an interview. Like you might run a usability test where you have somebody walk through a set of scripted tasks with a prototype, but you might, you know,

Interview them before or afterwards. And so that's where I think I get a little sloppy with my definition. So I guess that's not an interview overall, but you are sort of using interviewing as a as a process or as a tactic to do that.

But I think, yeah, if you step back, an interview is a conversation or it looks like a conversation. We use very different tactics to have this quote unquote conversation between one or maybe two researchers and one or maybe two.

Users, customers, participants kind of call them what you want. There's jargon that comes up like semi-structured, which I don't even want to try to define, open-ended. When you do an interview, you have some prepared questions, but then the conversation goes in different places. You ask lots and lots of follow-up.

So it's not, you know, it's not like a verbal survey where it's question. Give me your answer. Next question. Give me your answer. You are trying to explore. And so interview A and interview B are going to be a little bit different. Even if you have the same kind of population, you have the same sample, you have the same discussion guide. So there is a.

Yeah. Kind of an emergent exploratory nature to the conversation. Even if your topic isn't exploratory, you still want to explore with that person and sort of ask more and ask more, try to get to something before you kind of move on. Um, so that's kind of what a, what an interview is like. I think there are other aspects like where does that interview take place, you know, and because so much is online now, like the conversation we're having, a lot of that is happening, um,

is happening in sort of remote online virtual environments. I think if we go back to sort of in-person stuff, I don't think of if you bring somebody or have them meet you in a market research facility or usability lab,

it's still an interview, but you're kind of changing some of the nature of it. Ideally, there's an in-context aspect to it where you are asking that person about their experience and you are seeing their things and how they work on their devices and what their process is in their environment and so on. So kind of getting as far into their context as you can, depending on the logistics of how you approach it.

Yeah, I appreciate what you said about this method seeming like a conversation. I mean, anyway, it is a conversation, but I appreciate that you frame it this way because I feel like there's this expectation around interviews being a certain way. And part of that is, I mean, for one, we're on a podcast right now, right? We're doing a podcast interview. Podcast interviews are going to be totally different from like a research interview where your goal is going to be very different.

And similarly, where you're having a conversation with a friend relating with them on a deep level, that's also going to be a little bit different from, say, a research interview. And I think it's important to note that it's not just any old conversation, but one where you're really trying to get to know that person on the other side, the user, the participant in this case.

um so actually i i kind of want to get to know how how did you get into research how did you get so fascinated by user interviews in general and just research in general i was lucky to i guess i would call it stumble upon this uh this is a way of working kind of early in my career uh and i had a a

I had a degree in human computer interaction in the days before the web, in the days before we talked about user experience, where this was a kind of a design activity and people had portfolios and processes and so on. So I had a degree, but not really a skill or any expertise in making a thing. And I ended up working in this design consultancy that was

doing a little bit around kind of software and I don't know if we didn't really call it design. It wasn't really practice like design, but elsewhere in this organization was an emerging practice in helping organizations that they were serving figure out what to make as opposed to how to make it. And it was really saying that, hey, there's work to be done in

understanding the problem space, understanding the users. And it was cool because we didn't call it user research. We called it based on the outcome. What value were we bringing? And research is a method to get to that. So, you know, in doing this work and learning kind of on the job and this sort of

quasi-apprenticeship experience that I had. I got to see what happened in interviews and I got to tag along in interviews and I got to practice asking a question and I got to eventually lead interviews and teach other people how to run interviews and work on a process for how you make sense of the stuff that you get in a quote conversation. I think it was with the interviews where

And, you know, I really had to work hard to learn it. But once I felt like I was learning something, there was, I don't know, a switch kind of flip for me. Like, oh, this is this. Not only is this a thing, but I think this is my thing. I'm still learning. I mean, you learn about people every time you do that. But you also learn about the practice of asking questions, of interviewing people every single time.

you know, through making mistakes or just having some reflections about it. So that it continues to excite me and challenge me, you know, as I've been doing it all these years. That's amazing. And I agree. This is one of those methods that I started learning. It was not the first method I had learned. A lot of the data gathering I did initially when I got into this field was surveys. And I mean, I guess that's tends to be a popular choice for

People who work from, say, a marketing type of perspective. And that was sort of what I did a lot of my undergraduate classwork in. So it was sort of the natural thing that I turned to when I thought, hey, I want feedback from people. Let me blast out a survey.

And granted, there is a time and place for surveys. I'm not trying to badmouth them. I think they're certainly a very great tool for getting some quantitative feedback. But I guess I'd love to use that as an opportunity to talk about why

Would someone perhaps choose to do an interview versus blast out a survey? Because interviews, like to your point, are a bit challenging to run. Right. Which this kind of feels like a meta moment because I'm facilitating an interview right now. But there's you know, there's a lot to consider, like body language. There's a lot to consider about how you ask your questions or how you probe about a particular topic.

Why would someone intentionally choose this method that also takes longer and costs more versus blasting out a survey, which is obviously going to be a bit less involved? Right. I mean, both surveys and interviews look they may look easy. It's just having a conversation. It's just typing up a bunch of questions into a.

whatever, a Google form or whatever platform. And I think they both are deceptive that way because they're, they take a lot of thought and intention and practice to do well. Um, and I think you run the risk in both cases of, of, I guess, any kind of research garbage in garbage out. If you don't, you know, craft your approach, um,

Now, you're a survey expert. You may disagree with me. So I'm going to go on a limb and say what a survey doesn't necessarily do is tell you why. But an interview can tell you why, because you have the opportunity to ask follow up questions. So you might ask that same initial question. What's you know, what's the motivation?

Well, I mean, back up a little bit even. In a survey, you might give people four choices of something or let them write in another example, but you might see some patterns or some groupings. But in an interview, you might ask it in an open-ended way. You might not say which of the four following has kind of directed your reference or your behavior, but what is it that kind of informs your choice? So you ask this open-ended question.

And so sometimes our questions have huge amounts of assumptions built into them about how people do things or how they think about it or what the choice is or what actually comes before something else. So you can hear those moments in an interview. You can switch things.

uh, switch direction and, um, ask follow-ups or let the person reframe the whole context of what we're even talking about. And you can adapt on the fly, um, and ask more and ask more and ask more and kind of continue till you understand why, you know, one of the things I do like about interviews and I kind of was getting at this a little bit is that it's

It's a method that changes the researcher. It changes their understanding of people, of the problem, of the opportunity. And it does that in this experiential kind of immersive way. If I'm going to talk to a number of people over the course of a week,

You know, it's good. I'm going to be scratching my chin, you know, on the dog walk or thinking in the shower. Like it gives you a lot of experiential stuff to chew on. The conclusions that you take are not obvious. They're not in the interview. And it kind of, for me, it's a very rewarding experience to kind of be pushed into this sort of sustained experience.

creative state as you're thinking about you know the people that you met and how they talked and how they how they view their work and how they view their lives because it even if it doesn't directly go there it goes there indirectly you start to understand something about other kinds of people so it's really rich and rewarding which you know is nice on its own i guess but it's um a really powerful way to stimulate

Thinking about what it is that we're trying to answer. So I, you know, I get a lot out of it with the data and I get a lot out of it with the experience and that. Is different than other methods and again can compliment and be complimented by other methods because they answer different kinds of questions.

Absolutely. I have to say, when I started running interviews, the thought of experiential learning, like you're just saying, was really...

powerful for me. And that sounds like a big word, like powerful, what? But it really was because it was an opportunity to talk to another person and to connect with them in a very different way than you can in a survey. And part of that is, I mean, sure, in a survey, I could certainly say, why did you think that if someone chooses some sort of

satisfaction rating, fine. But the likelihood that I'm going to get any more than maybe a sentence or a couple sentences is pretty low, right? It's usually going to be some sort of short, stunted statement. And if someone's really angry, maybe they'll write a little bit more. But I'm still not going to necessarily get the nuance of what someone has really experienced. And being able to talk to someone is

is going to give you so much richer data. You can connect emotional sentiment and even some of the more complicated emotional sentiments that maybe people won't be talking about or think is worth talking about in a survey.

And to your point, you can also drill a little bit deeper, ask questions like, well, what about this particular topic? Let's explore that a little bit more. Like you were saying, the survey, when it goes out, it goes out. And there's no interesting comment from this person here. Let's follow up with them. I mean, you might be able to try, but.

the likelihood that you'll have any sustained conversation after that is low, if not none. So I do think that interviews have this value that is sometimes undervalued in the sense that surveys can sometimes be a bit overprioritized or seen as kind of the easy button solution to getting user feedback.

So, yes, while I do still use surveys occasionally, I usually treat them a bit differently or I don't rely on them purely as the main source of user feedback. And I kind of acknowledge that, hey, there might be other methods that could be beneficial here. Like maybe an interview would help supplement and add a little bit more context than the surveys currently getting me. Or maybe the survey is going to be a good starting point, whereas the interview is where I focus on maybe some really specific topics.

questions that maybe I want to dig deeper on. So I totally agree with that. I guess to your point, you are kind of related to what you said earlier. Why wouldn't someone want to use interviews? Because it does seem like these are excellent methods. But is there a time or place where maybe other types of methods are more appropriate other than surveys, for example?

Yes. And there are dozens and dozens of methods and we make up new methods all the time. This is a great topic that you all have actually published, I think the classic article on this by Christian Rohr. I think when to choose which user experience research method. I might not have the title exactly right, but it's a classic. Every

Everyone, if anyone cites this all the time and he does a great job of kind of laying out different methods and what kinds of questions they answer. So one example is, you know, let's say we wanted to understand there's there's two different navigational paths on a Web site to kind of complete some task. And we want to understand, I don't know which one people would choose or which one.

If people go down those paths, which one do people get further down? Let's say we want them to complete something like make a purchase or register. So, you know, path A versus path B, which leads to more success? Well, that's not something you can do in an interview.

But it's something you can do like in an A/B test. So you put those up and people are randomly sampled on your site and they're directed towards something. And you can maybe, depending on your site and your traffic, you might be able to get a lot of data very quickly about two different design choices or two different kind of implementation choices. Again, you don't understand why.

And maybe you don't need to understand why at this juncture, like maybe you've done some interviews and or done some design explorations and you have. 2 different ideas and you should want to see which 1 works better. You know, I think you put it really well, right? We could combine different methods and we could.

If we needed to understand why we wanted to dig deeper into like, what is what's the objective in going down this path or what's the mental model about how this site is structured or what's the anticipated reward at the end of this path? We might want to do an interview. We might want to sit with someone and have them go through this path and choose A versus B or show them A and show them B.

Is that a usability test or interview? It goes back to your initial question. I don't know. It's sort of using interviewing to ask why. But if that's not our question, if our question is sort of which one or what or sort of even how,

Then we would sort of run an experiment or put these things in front of people and kind of track that. That's a very different kind of initial question than the ones with the with an interview. But that's a scenario, I think, where you wouldn't use an interview initially. You would use an A-B test to get that answer. Right.

Right. And I think, yeah, there's obviously going to be certain things that you might not be able to ask somebody because it just simply is too fraught with challenges. Like what comes to mind is maybe we ask someone, what is the process you take when buying a house? And like, certainly someone can

Like talk from memory about a time they bought their house and maybe they give a lot of detail, but there still might be missing pieces that not because someone's being malicious or withholding information, but maybe they just didn't think it was worth talking about or forgot about it.

And, and I think that's one of the challenges with interviews as well as like maybe some form of observational data, or if we were to say combined with like a diary study where someone is tracking what they're doing over a longer period of time, then, then these methods might help to compliment where an interview, which as much as I would love to talk to people all day long, right. There's kind of a time limit to it. Another thing that comes to mind is maybe an impractical scenario to observe, like, um,

There are probably going to be some parents listening to this podcast who would say, yeah, if we were studying something like a baby waking up at three in the morning, is it really practical for a researcher to be present and observing that?

Possibly, but maybe that's not something people have the budget for or invasion of privacy might not be that interesting. So that's where that interview can obviously fill the gap of perhaps something that's really hard to observe as well. Obviously, this is a topic you're very passionate about and there's opportunities to interview users, not just as its own standalone method, but even within other methods like usability tests or field studies.

And it's a topic that you're passionate about so much that you not only wrote a book, but you've also had created this second edition 10 years after the publishing of your first edition, Interviewing Users. What would you say has changed over the past 10 years when it comes to interviewing users?

And I think the context in which we do research, I mean, of any method, but certainly interviewing, has changed in 10 years. You know, we've seen a lot more organizations building up teams of user researchers that, you know, are doing interviews. We've seen

a lot more people inside organizations. And the term Kate Tousey has this great term, she calls them people who do research, PWDR. And so she is a writer about research operations and a leader and teacher in that field. And she talks about, you've got researchers and you've got PWDR. And that framework I think is really helpful because, you know, we've been sort of struggling, I think collectively as a field over like to

to ask ourselves, like, well, who does this work? Is this people with titles? Is this consultants or vendors or partners? Is this, you know, whatever you go across your organization? And I think it's still an open question, but it's shifted over 10 years. You have

You have fewer consultants and external practitioners. You have more internal practitioners. And so you have with that, that we've also seen you have leadership. So I think you could go back a number of years and a company may have a researcher on staff.

But they maybe didn't, they reported into some other organization. So kind of the maturity of research as an in-house function. So you have, you know, you have career ladders, you have ways to progress and you have teams with different methods kind of brought together. And this, I mentioned research operations. This was not really a term that got used very much of at all 10 years ago.

this idea that, um, you know, the operational support to make an organization ready to effectively perform research. So there's lots of, there's lots of tactical aspects, logistical aspects, legal compliance aspects, which we really didn't talk about. So we kind of tried to avoid maybe 10 years ago. Um,

that have, you know, legislation has gotten more serious, the consequences. There are, you know, there are, I know I have colleagues who have, who are research leaders and they have a partner in the legal department of their organization. And that person is set up to, that legal person is set up to empower a research person to do their work, as opposed to maybe in the past, they maybe weren't told about it so that they didn't block it. So, yeah,

And that's kind of that's some operational mindset that says, you know, what do we have to do as an organization to be effective this way? What tools, what practices, what skills do we need? And so that I mean, that's a very mature kind of narrative about how research works inside the organization. So it wasn't in the organization as much. And if it was, it was, you know, maybe opportunistic or kind of, you know, small and not sort of fully empowered.

Um, so I think that, that, and, you know, if that's not you and, you know, you're listening to this, you know, like, that's not you. Um, you know, I would say like, I don't want anyone to feel bad. I think, you know, you're now part of a more mature, uh, practice and there is sort of better examples about what this looks like when it's kind of

built to scale, fully staffed. And, you know, yeah, it's a big, I don't think everything is rosy for researchers in organizations or as partners at all. It's hard work. It's uphill work, but yeah,

you know, the baseline or the examples that we can look left and right and kind of see where there's a commitment and an investment and what a difference that makes. We didn't have that 10 years ago. So that context has really, I think, changed. So, you know, who I'm writing to now and what I want to kind of arm them with, you know, I have much more to pull from and I have a little more clarity and direction in trying to

address the different participants in research, the researchers, the PWDR, kind of, you know, that whole system. Yeah, definitely. I think overall, I totally agree. I think the field has really matured to the point that we're not only saying research is important, which I think was sort of the

the chant that we often had to basically repeat over and over and over in order to get seen or even taken seriously in a lot of meetings. We kind of move beyond that where now there is, generally speaking, again, to what you said earlier, there are some organizations that are still a little bit less mature, you know, as far as what they're currently incorporating in their research practice. But overall, the field is

knows the importance of research and has started doing it often. And so now the question is, well, if we do have people who are trained researchers, and if we have other people who are maybe not trained researchers, but still see the value, and maybe their organization doesn't happen to have that researcher role, can you still do these? I think there still is room to do all of that.

But I think there's also a challenge now where if we have all these different people doing research and researchers doing research, how do we de-conflict, you know, perhaps overlap? And that's like a whole nother can of worms. I know Cara Pernice has also done a lot of work in research ops, has her own class on it. Kate Towsie, like you were saying, is a great research ops thought leader as well.

But yeah, that's a huge change and a huge shift. And I think it's a good shift overall, even though it is more complicated. I think that it bodes well as a whole for just the idea that interviews are something that people don't balk at as like an extra step, but as something that, hey, yeah, that's an excellent idea. Let's go and do that. I guess a follow-up I have is actually about how

how maybe interviews are also more accepted or more readily accepted in part by this kind of catalyst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now made remote research the norm, right? Which I think we were slowly moving toward that, but now it is very much the norm. So what are your thoughts on like remote interviewing? Are these better or worse? I feel like there are some

There are different schools of thought on this, and I would love to know what you think. Yeah, I mean, hopefully it doesn't have to be a binary, like we're only doing one or only doing the other. I think, you know, there's some certainly some benefits to remote research. It's it takes less time because you're just at your at your computer to do it.

I think, and I don't know if this is totally right, but I think there is some narrative that it provides more opportunity for inclusion. That you might, if you're the researcher or planning to research, you might be able to, quote, get to places that

Not that you couldn't go, but maybe you wouldn't go. One example is like people in rural environments know that, you know, it's sort of, if you're going to do in-person research, you might go to a city and like, you know, very quickly you can get a bunch of different kinds of neighborhoods or different demographics spread. But to go to a, you know, a low population area where you got to, you know, fly to a small airport and drive and,

and so on, that is like the cost for that is high. That's one area where you can bring in people that you might not be able to access as easily or you would have chosen not to. I think there's more complex issues around this is very technology based. So are we including people? Are we excluding people that don't have access to this technology?

You know, I suspect we're just replicating the biases that were in place, but maybe we're introducing new ones. And maybe there are people that are, you know, that can we can find people that, you know, maybe aren't office based, that aren't laptop based, but that are carrying around a phone and using a phone and, you know,

where we can involve them. So I guess I think there's an inclusion question and I don't really want to come down hard on like, this is what's happening because there's, you know, it is still a shift. And I think it's, but it's an opportunity for people to consider those things. I grieve, and I'm using that word pretty strongly. Like I grieve the loss of in-person interviews because, you know, for all, and you were saying this really well about the connection we have with people

It's different over a computer. It creates challenges. And this is I mean, we know this because all of our meetings and keeping touch with our extended family, like we've lived our lives, you know, to a greater or lesser extent for several years this way. And it's it's created new opportunities and it's limited other kinds of things. And I really miss that.

There's just an excitement and a fear and a challenge and an inspiration that comes to me from being in the same room with somebody and seeing what their environment looks like and being shown around their workspace or getting a little tour of their house or peeking in their fridge or whatever.

whatever that is. And, you know, yes, there are workarounds to kind of how do we get that data? I guess I'm talking more from like, you know, that human experiential aspect of research. I enjoy talking to people and I get something out of it when I can go meet them. And I'm an introvert. I don't want to do that all the time. It takes energy, et cetera, et cetera. But something really amazing happens. So I would love to see us

you know, move to sort of choosing when and where and how we still do this. And that, you know, we've been talking all along about how do we kind of combine different methods. I think

Some remote, some in person, you know, so that we are sampling broadly and, you know, being as inclusive as possible, but giving us. And, hey, it's not just me. Like when I take my clients out to do research, right, to see what happens with their eyes, to see, you know, to drive back from the interview in the car with them and hear what they're talking about.

I can see that they're changed and the debriefs and discussions we have from these, I mean, fairly profound experiences, even about very ordinary topics, like stuff happens, stuff happens to us and we talk about it and I learn about them.

I learn about how they think about their customers. I learn about the problem space. I learn about their decision-making culture. I get this interesting kind of access. And we don't get that when we run a 15-minute debrief in the Zoom after we hang up the Zoom with the person. And I'm not deriding those things. Those are like, there's a lot of really good optimizing that's happened in remote research. Like it's really grown up a lot over a few years.

But I like the messier interpersonal aspects as well and kind of what I can get out of them. And yeah, I haven't done an in-person interview in several years. And I would really, really like to get that back into my life because I just find it really joyful ultimately. Yeah, it has been a few years for me as well. And like you're saying, part of it is because it is cheaper. You don't have to travel. It's

You can get easy access to people. And yeah, regarding that inclusivity question, like there are lots of people who suddenly can do interviews that maybe in the past couldn't because they couldn't leave wherever they're working to get to where the interview is. Or we couldn't talk to them as easily outside of these office hours. When thinking about the past 10 years, obviously this is one big shift. There are many other big shifts. What hasn't changed in the past 10 years, do you think?

I mean, this is still like a, you know, an enterprise of connecting with people and listening to them deeply and learning ourselves how to be good at listening deeply and understanding what's not being said as much as what is being said and learning where to follow up and, you know, doing the hard work.

the hard heads down and collaborative work to connect these disparate dots into something new that we can bring together and recommend as an implication or as an action that we can take. I mean, that's the work. And so the tools that we use to do it will change. Who's involved in doing it will change.

but that i mean at its at its fundamental level it is this sort of human to human and kind of creative you know connecting disparate dots sort of work um and that and i can't imagine that changing that is that is what we do um so yeah it's fun to revisit like you know in in rewriting or writing an iteration like um i don't think any of my advice from the past was wrong but i have

lots of my own experiences to kind of update or better ways of explaining things or things that I've tried and messed up that, that I feel like the context has changed. The fundamental sort of the backbone of this is the same, but I have 10 more years of thinking about it that, you know, has helped me feel like, oh, I can explain it better or explain it in a fresh way. Um, so that, that's kind of fun to do, I think, you know, as a,

as a writer or a thought leader on this stuff that, you know, was part of my, my thought process and my practice. I agree. I think over the last 10 years that there have been a lot of changes, but human beings like human to human conversation, conversation hasn't changed in eons for, for many, many decades. And,

I think there's always going to be this fundamental aspect of how do we converse with one another? How do we connect with one another that, that largely won't change. But I also agree to with you in the sense that it's taken me many years to get better at interviews. I do teach a class about it and I do know what some of my kryptonite sort of moments are, or some of my weak spots are and I continue to work on them, but,

It's, it often does take quite a bit of time to build awareness around some of these more logistical challenges like how do I ask these questions or how do I.

convey that I'm listening? How can I be an active listener? How do I analyze the data? There's so many more things that I know I'm continuing to explore as well in our own research here at NNG. So Steve, to wrap up, I did have one final question for you, which was, what advice would you give to people who are looking to level up their interviewing skills?

I liked your description of kryptonite. I think that we all have those. And, you know, one of the things that we get from, I don't know, listening to podcasts or reading books or just any kind of practice and reflect is a chance to see what those are and, you know, and reflect on them and, you know, and try to work on them. I think everybody is like that. You really put it so well. So I'm going to highlight one that I think is fairly common and kind of challenging. And that is that.

It's about putting the answers in the question. So I'll give a good and bad example. So what people might often do is say, what did you have for breakfast today? Did you have toast or juice or cereal?

and even kind of trail off. Sometimes they just kind of end with an err, or like the voice is kind of holding onto it. And the question, the expert question is, what did you have for breakfast today? And I think like, I wanna unpack a little bit about why we do that and why it's bad. We do that because that moment at which you stop asking your question and kind of hand it over to the other person is fraught. It's actually much worse in remote.

because like turn taking isn't well supported by the microphones. They cut each other off. Lag, a little bit of lag in audio or video makes that very, there's a very sort of automatic human. We know about intake of breath and body language. Like we pick all that up when we're face to face with somebody and that's makes us better at turn taking. And that's really what that is, right? I'm done talking. Now I want you to talk.

So in remote, it's even worse. But in general, it's still uncertain. You don't know this person. Some people, you know, nod while the other is talking, which you and I are doing this whole this whole interview. Other people just keep their bodies entirely stock and they still and they just stare at you. And so you don't know, you know, at a sort of a gut level, it's uncertain. Is it OK to ask this question?

What's the person going to do? And so I think our naive self tries to be, quote, helpful. Let me be helpful to the person and sort of lower the lower the intimidation factor. And so I'm going to like help you with the question by making some suggestions as to what I might mean.

And so that's why we're doing it. It's anxiety provoking to ask the question. What did you have for breakfast? Stop. That is tougher than the drawn out question. But the problem with that is it turns it into like a multiple choice question. And it starts to position you as the keeper of the right answers. And I think what we don't realize as interviewers, unless we've been on the other side,

is how much power that interview has to the participant and how much that participant wants to do a good job. And that goes against what you're trying to accomplish. You don't want that power.

You don't want them to be pleasing you, to be reflecting your mental model, your list of options. And so, you know, I think if you're new to this, you might hear my example and say like, you know, so yes, you said, you know, juice, toast, cereal. And if the person had pizza for breakfast, they can just say, no, no, I didn't have any of those things. What I had was pizza.

And maybe the first time they'll kind of push back. But eventually, over the course of this interview, the more you tell them what a good answer looks like, the more they are going to, without really thinking about it, you know, adapt to the rules that you're training them on. And so you'll get them. You're reinforcing your power and you're going to get answers that reflect back what's in your questions.

And so you miss the chance to get an answer that falls outside of that that list. And you're not trying to give them a complete list. You're trying to give them for examples. But it doesn't come across that way. So, again, this is very, very hard, which is why I'm like unpacking it so far. Like and I think people will find. Oh, yeah, I do that. I mean, I hope people recognize it. Yeah.

either now or the next time they do it. Not because I want anyone to feel bad, but because I want someone to do exactly what you're talking about, which is like, be aware of your kryptonite moments and like, just try once not to do that and feel that discomfort. Like that's, that's the thing to kind of work on. So anyway, that's one sort of

simplistic and yet I think deceptively challenging piece that I think can make a big difference in the quality of the interview and what you're learning from that. I absolutely agree. And

For those who aren't listening to or aren't watching the video version of this podcast, the entire time Steve was just mentioning this particular quirk, I was smiling and laughing because I do this precise thing all the time. Well, I've been more aware of it more lately, but...

but it is one of those things that when I was especially a less experienced researcher, I did way more often. And it's something I've been trying to do a lot less. It's hard because like you're saying, turn-taking is hard, but when you're also hyper aware of that turn-taking, even if it's in person, but especially remote,

it is hard to stop. And it's also hard to not help. And one of the things that I noticed about my interviewing is that

Not just helping by offering examples, but sometimes helping also would look like, oh, I want to be a relatable person. I want to connect with this person even more. So I'm going to share a little bit about my life experiences, which for a podcast, that's fine. But for a research interview, that might not be fine because then I'm starting to offer examples from my life that might

taint this person's actual accounts of what they do in their life. Or maybe they'll realize that they don't relate with me after all, because they had a totally different experience. So I think that, and I like how you framed it as trying to help, because I don't think we do this maliciously or narcissistically, but out of this desire to help and connect. And I think if we can kind of catch it in the moment and, and,

find a way to frame the way we're asking questions as my helping should really be focused on asking this question as clearly and concisely as possible. Like that's going to be a much better use of my time and certainly a better way to help. So yeah,

I appreciate you sharing this. And it did kind of give me a moment of pause too. And maybe I'm starting to get a little nervous now, like, oh no, did I do this for the whole interview? But hopefully I've done okay for this batch. But anyway, Steve, I just wanted to say thank you for sharing this advice, for sharing all of these great pieces of

insight about interviewing. And I think it's going to be amazing to read your book. So for those listening, I'm going to hold it up interviewing users. I'm going to hold it up for those watching.

There's a copy. Yes. Yes. So this is the interviewing user second edition. And, you know, make sure to check that out. But Steve, if anyone wants to follow you and your work, is there anywhere you can point them to website wise, social media handle wise? Yeah, two places. My website is my last name, Portugal, portugal.com. So, you know, I post, I'll post this here when it, when it comes out, I try to keep,

Up to date on things that I'm doing that I have to share. And social media, probably LinkedIn, I think would be the best place. So it's my name on LinkedIn. I love people to connect with me there and get to chat with them.

Awesome. Well, Steve, thanks so much for your time today. It's been a lot of fun interviewing you. And it's given me a lot of food for thought as I think about my own interviewing practice. So thank you so much for your time and hope you have a great day. Thanks. Thank you. And same to you. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you want to learn more about UX, a great place is to go to our website. There you can find thousands of articles, videos and reports about UX.

This website is www.nngroup.com. On that note, if you want to stay up to date on our latest research and publications, we do have a weekly email newsletter, which features our latest articles, videos, and upcoming online courses. And if you enjoy this show, please follow or subscribe on your podcast platform of choice.

This episode was hosted by Therese Fassenden and produced by me, Tim Noiseson. All editing and post-production is by Larry Moore Production Company. That's it for today's show. Until next time. And remember, keep it simple.