Interviewing Users. Steve Portigal
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the participant just said, indicate where your question comes from. For example, “Earlier, you told us that...” or “I want to go back to something else you said....” Not only does this help the person know that you’re looping back, it also indicates that you are really paying attention to what they are telling you, that you remember it, and that you are interested. If you are going to change topics, just signal your transitions: “Great. Now I’d like to move on to a totally different topic.”
Be Aware of Your Body Language
Make and maintain eye contact with your participant. If you find eye contact personally challenging, take breaks and aim your gaze at their face, their hands, and items they are showing you. Use your eyes to signal your commitment to the interview. Acknowledge their comments with head nods or simple “mm-hmm” sounds. Be conscious of your body position. When you are listening, you should be leaning forward and visibly engaged (see Figure 2.5). When you aren’t listening, your body tells that story, too (see Figure 2.6).
FIGURE 2.5 Good listening body language.
FIGURE 2.6 Not so much.
The listening body language is important because it not only gets you in the state, or reflects the state that you’re in, but it also very clearly tells the person you’re talking to that you are listening.
If your brain is listening, your body will naturally follow. But it works the other way, too! Just as therapists and life coaches encourage people to “act as if,” you can also put your body into a listening posture and your brain will follow. Consider the example described by Malcolm Gladwell in his article The Naked Face. He describes the work of psychologists who developed a coding system for facial expressions. As they identified the muscle groups and what different combinations signified, they realized that in moving those muscles, they were inducing the actual feelings. He writes:
Emotion doesn’t just go from the inside out. It goes from the outside in...In the facial-feedback system, an expression you do not even know that you have can create an emotion you did not choose to feel.
TIP FEEDBACK IS BACK
If you are recording your interviews on video for later editing, you may find the “mm-hmm” noises incredibly aggravating. Unless you are miking your participants, your affirmations may be much louder than their responses (see Figure 2.7). For novice interviewers in particular, it’s still good to let the “mm-hmm” fly and really work on developing rapport, even if the resulting video is going to suffer a bit. It’s better to have abrupt audio changes in the deliverable than fail to achieve the maximum possible rapport in the interview. As you gain experience interviewing, learn to silently affirm with facial expressions and head-nods, and throw in the vocalization only occasionally.
FIGURE 2.7 The interviewer’s affirmations can be louder than the participant’s comments.
Summary
Experts have a set of best practices—tactics, really—that they follow. But what really makes them expert is that they have a set of operating principles. This looks more like a framework for how to be, rather than a list of what to do. You will have your own framework, but mine consists of the following:
• Check your worldview at the door. When you begin fieldwork, don’t fixate on what you expect to learn, but rather cultivate your own general, non-specific curiosity.
• Embrace how other people see the world. Do your fieldwork in their environments—not in yours. Before you head out to the field, get the team together and do a cleansing brain dump of all the things you might possibly expect to see and hear, leaving you open to what is really waiting for you out there.
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