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How to get the most out of an interview with a subject matter expert
Understanding the difference between expert and user interviews
You may be losing a lot of useful information if you treat an expert interview like a user interview.
That’s one of the lessons I learned early on in my career.
On one of the first interviews I ever took notes for, my mentor seemed to veer off script, asking questions that weren’t part of the testing process and seemingly spending most of the time chatting about something else. I voiced my concerns during the debrief, only to be told that this person was one of the foremost experts in the field we were studying.
It was only further along in my UX career that I learned that was an Expert Interview with a Subject Matter Expert (SME), and more importantly, that it was best that we didn’t do the normal user interview. And that lesson only sank in recently, when I squeezed in an Expert Interview in the middle of user testing. Expert interviews have a different purpose than user interviews, and to treat them otherwise is to lose a lot of potentially useful information. To understand why, I’ll talk about the environment where I learned UX: Healthcare.
