UX Research: Interviewing and probes

Methods for interviewing your users and getting to know them better.

Rohini Malpe
UX Collective
7 min readMay 2, 2020

Three women engaged in discussion sitting across a table from each other.
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Semi-structured interviews

Get the information you need, while also being flexible and allowing room for exploration. In this type of interview, the researcher asks open ended questions to participants, but from a preplanned list.

I selected the semi-structured interview because I was able to narrow down some areas or topics that I want to ask to the junior researchers. A completely unstructured interview has the risk of not eliciting form the junior researchers the topics or themes more closely related to the research questions under consideration. There are some specific topics that I would like to cover, but at the same time I want to hear their stories.

S.E. Rabionet, 2011

Procedure

  1. Prepare an interview guide. This can be a list of topics and questions you want to cover, but loosely structured to let you conduct the interview based on your participant’s responses.
  2. Plan your introduction and a few warm up questions. A proper introduction helps to set the stage for a more comfortable and friendly interaction with your participant.
  3. Record the interview. You can do this by taking notes, audio recording or a video of the interview. Make sure to record anything with informed consent from your interviewee.

Example

I used this method while interviewing designers for a project to learn the design philosophies and stories of experienced designers. My team came up with a structure and common themes for what we wanted to learn from designers. I based my questions on these themes, but mostly followed more of an open conversational format to hear the stories of my interviewees. Having a loose structure helped me manage time constraints in the interview.

Sensemaking

Organize all your recordings and notes and analyse them to find insights. An advantage of allowing more open conversation in interviews is also having surprising discoveries and finding new directions in your project.

Contextual inquiry

Work with people in their own environment and observe their daily activities to gain a deeper understanding of what they do.

One of the most powerful characteristics of contextual inquiry is its application of the master/apprentice relationship model. Just as an apprentice learns by watching, respectfully asking questions, and seeking to understand why things are done a certain way, the master craftsman teaches by doing and talking about tasks as they play out.

Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington, Universal Methods of Design

Procedure

  1. Recruit participants who are directly involved with the tasks or activities you’re trying to observe.
  2. Set up a few hours everyday to observe them as they do those tasks.
  3. Take notes on how they work, learn about the technical terms they use, document the objects and tools they use, their methods of organization, the interactions they have with other people and how they handle interruptions.
  4. It is important to verify your observations and interpretation with the participant at the end of your session, and ask them any questions you might have.

Example

Researchers working on autonomous technologies for agricultural farming at the University of Queensland in Australia wanted to understand the perspective of farmers towards incorporating robots in their farming practices. They conducted field visits and contextual inquiry which helped them understand farming practices better, get an initial understanding of how their technology will be integrated in current farming practices, and build a relationship with the farming community for further cooperative research. (Snow et al., CHI 2015)

Sensemaking

The observations and notes collected from this method can be used to understand how people work, the culture of their work, the activities integral to their job and tools and methods used by them. This information can give deeper insights into your design space.

Walking probes

Walk with your participants acting as your guide to learn about locations important to them, and their experiences with different places.

Depending on the circumstance, ethnographers can suggest to informants that they visit a particular place, or they can ask people to suggest a place of interest. In both cases, the idea is simply to walk around and encourage the informant to talk about past and current associations with the physical surroundings.

Leon et al., 2005

Procedure

  1. Ask someone to give you a tour of places they would want to show you.
  2. During the tour, ask questions about the locations and the participant’s experiences/memories connected to them.
  3. Pay attention to what you see around you - visible infrastructure, nature, people and their behavior, objects and any indicators of culture.
  4. Take notes of anything you find relevant, interesting or surprising.

Example

My team used this method in a project to understand how a food bank works. We asked the manager at the food bank to give us a tour of their facility, and spent over an hour learning about their infrastructure, layout of the facility, food collection and storage practices, and personal experiences of the manager while working at the food bank.

Sensemaking

Your observations and notes can be used to get a better understanding of your design space. You can also learn about important locations or events that happened in an area, how your participants relate to specific places and the culture of those places.

Cultural probes

Inspire ideas in a design space by engaging participants using objects, artifacts and open-ended prompts. These are specially useful over a long period of time or when there’s a geographic or cultural distance between you and your participants.

Cultural probes are specifically casual and informal, yet thoughtful in their aesthetic craft, message, and delivery, created to inspire delight and respect, response and return. The materials created for probe kits should be varied and imaginative, designed to elicit responses that are relevant to the particular design inquiry.

Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington, Universal Methods of Design

Procedure

  1. Find the activities you would want to include in your probe kits. These could help to open up conversations about your design space, be inspirational, provocative or help you learn more about your participants and their lives.
  2. Create your probe kits. These should be aesthetically crafted to convey personal and informal feelings. They should not look too polished and invite people to interact with them.
  3. Brief your participants about the activities, let them know how they can take notes/record their thoughts over a specific period.
  4. Conduct follow up sessions to learn about their experience with the probe kits.

Example

The Cultural Research in Technology (CRIT) lab at Indiana University deployed a design collection of artifacts called ‘Persuasive Anxiety’ that explored personal tracking and people’s relationships with physical health norms. For example, there was ‘Candy Camera’, a candy dispensing machine that took pictures of people every time they took candy and displayed their pictures on the machine. (Bardzell et al., 2017)

Sensemaking

The information gathered from cultural probes and follow up sessions is meant to give us a deeper understanding of our participants, spark inspiration and help us define a better design direction for our project.

Artifact analysis

Examine artifacts to get a better understanding of their social and cultural context. There are a lot of criteria for analysing artifacts such as their material, form, texture, wear and tear, location and historical or cultural reference.

The emphasis of artifact analysis is on the object itself. Artifact analysis asks: what do objects have to say about people and their culture, time, and place? The researcher is attempting to understand the substance of the object and what it says through its material, aesthetic, and interactive qualities.

Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington, Universal Methods of Design

Procedure

  1. Artifact Analysis involves asking a lot of questions. It can help to have a questionnaire or list of criteria for examination that will act as a guide for you when conducting the analysis.
  2. You can conduct it in your participant’s environment to get more context about the artifact’s placement, arrangement with respect to other objects, and to understand the participant’s relationships with them.
  3. Observing artifacts while conducting walking probes can also help you learn a lot about the places your participant shows you. Try to observe and ask questions about the architecture, historical and cultural contexts of anything that stands out to you.

Example

A comparative case study of makerspaces was conducted through different methods such as field observations, interviews, and analysing artifacts, videos and documents. This helped them learn more about the practices and process of the people in these makerspaces. (Sheridan et al., 2014)

Sensemaking

Your observations and notes from this method can be used to gain insights on people, their behavior and their relationships with objects. It can also help you understand their culture better.

References

Rabionet S.E (2011) How I Learned to Design and Conduct Semi-structured Interviews: An Ongoing and Continuous Journey.

Redhead, F., Snow, S., Vyas, D., Bawden, O., Russell, R., Perez, T., & Brereton, M. “Bringing the Farmer Perspective to Agricultural Robots” presented in CHI 2015, Korea.

Leon, Jason & Cohen, Jeffrey. (2005). Object and Walking Probes in Ethnographic Interviewing.

Gross S., Bardzell S., Bardzell J., Stallings M. (2017) Persuasive Anxiety: Designing and Deploying Material and Formal Explorations of Personal Tracking Devices.

Sheridan K., Halverson E., Litts B., Brahms L., Jacobs-Priebe L., Owens T. (2014) Learning in the Making: A Comparative Case Study of Three Makerspaces.

Martin B., Hanington B. (2012) Universal methods of design: 100 ways to research complex problems, develop innovative ideas, and design effective solutions. Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers.

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