Making a real connection to users
How understanding power dynamics can make you better at conducting User Interviews.
“ In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Over the past 15 years, I’ve taken a thousand portraits of people from all walks of life. Some were celebrities and models, most were professionals — CEOs, professors, lawyers, traders, writers, & authors. The overarching theme was they were all people who weren’t interested or comfortable having their photo taken.
I learned early on, that my job wasn’t to show up, take a picture and leave, but to reveal my process and share with them in collaboration. I want them to leave the experience not only emotionally connected to me and what we made together, but having a deeper understanding of visual storytelling and how an image supports what you're trying to say.
This is called participatory decision-making. If you don’t practice good collaboration skills, you’ll never fully extract the knowledge contained deep within a group, in a constructive and productive way. Extracting insights and compiling your top findings is the destination, but to effectively get there you have to create a safe, free, inclusive, balanced journey to have all members fully participate. To solve a problem for any group of people, we need to make ourselves familiar with their environment and understand the way they see the world. The art of balancing power in any relationship is key to creating a safe free, inclusive, balanced journey in which all members fully participate.
In this article, I'm going to share some methods I use to stay cognizant of these power dynamics, how I respect the responsibility of having this power, how I share it, and how I implement them when conducting interviews to obtain the goals, needs, motivations, frustrations and influences of the user.
Preparing emotional parallels
This should go without saying, but you should truly understand why you’re asking specific questions. That means dialing in a custom script with probing questions so you don’t forget anything. I tend to find a story or an emotion that parallels the topic we’re interviewing and I’ll stay in that world for as long as I can. To be able to successfully do this, you need to do a good amount of ancillary research beforehand. Muscle memory is the goal here, and exercising that part of the brain will free yourself up to be genuine, engaging, and insightful.
Pro tip: For me personally, I love having a great notetaker (especially for remote interviews) as well as a recording of the interview. I’ve grown to have a shared Google Doc on the screen with my bullet points, and the note taker can write me messages along the way. This support allows me the confidence to freely explore different rabbit holes without worrying about missing a detail.
Find your charming period
The beginning of the interview is critical. This is where, in my experience, you can decide the depth of how comfortable you can make the participant. Reading scripts can be painful since everyone generally starts with the same boilerplate intro that is the standard of the industry.
It generally functions like this,
Hi, ___________. My name is _____________ and this is ___________. Thanks for setting some time aside for this interview.
We’re asking people just like yourself who have experience with (xyz.) This session can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour.
The first thing I want to make clear right away is that we ask that you be honest with your answers. There are no wrong answers. We want to learn as much about this ___________ as possible.
Please if you have any questions do not hesitate to ask. I’ll answer them immediately if I can or after the interview. And if you need to take a break at any point, just let me know.
First off, do we have your permission to record audio and/or video of our session?
The purpose of recording is so that my team and I can refer back to this session for feedback after our time here. We will be the only ones listening to this. Is that alright with you?
Do you have any questions so far?
Appears innocent enough as it explains the purpose of the interview and what’s hoping to be achieved. It touches on privacy and consent. It reassures the participant of expectations, and the period of time they’ll be dedicating — all stated in a succinct manner.
The part that I’ve noticed tripping up people conducting the interview is this:
The first thing I want to make clear right away is that we ask that you be honest with your answers. There are no wrong answers.
I’ve heard it read many different ways and it can come across as aggressive, embarrassing, & uncertain. It's also where the most amount of apologies and jokes are made by the interviewer. I believe there are two reasons for this;
- They didn’t write it, so it’s not in their voice and most people don’t speak like this.
- They declare the beginning/start of the interview with the participant.
One of my techniques is that I never officially declare the start of the interview. As soon as we’re communicating, no matter how casual, that's the start of the interview. I don’t feel the need to stop and say, “Now we will start the interview.” It feels forced and takes everyone out of the moment.
I’m a nurturing entertainer in that I’m engaging and genuinely excited to meet them. Think of when guests arrive at your house for a dinner party — you're charming. (remember when those existed?)
You greet them at the door, you take their coats, you offer them a ton of drink and snack options. You shuffle everyone to the congregation area where they regale each other with the cordial civilities of society, as they prepare to occupy the same pulse for the evening. It causal, but body language expressions, smiling, eye contact, politeness all set the mood for the agenda at hand — You’re going to all eat dinner together.
You’ll naturally land on a pivot point to start engaging in the script topics set out above. You intentionally set some words or topics that allow for this to happen, and you can gently guide them in that direction of your script without sounding like a robot.
I understand this is an a posteriori soft skill, and most people don’t possess the ability to casually display themselves in this type of situation. Though, if you understand that you’re the control in this experiment, you can display the confidence to give your participant power and trust allowing for a better chance at obtaining useful insights.
“This is the real secret of life– to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” — Alan Watts
Make a real connection
The goal is to come into this as a human experience. You want to be absorbed into the environment to create a moment in time that is authentic and difficult to recreate with anyone else.
Again this can be painfully difficult to achieve when reading from a script. We jump right into demographic/lifestyle/background questions and they can sound quite clinical. Some folks don't feel comfortable answering directly;
What is your age?
The antithesis is the question can come across as too broad and somewhat existential;
Tell me about yourself?
In order to make a real connection, everyone comfortable enough to open up. The goal shouldn’t be the end result of extracting the information, it should be about the journey getting there. This information will naturally unfold itself if the environment is right, and that’s your responsibility to try and get those conditions just right. This is where you leverage not declaring the start of the interview and use your general curiosity to propel the momentum of the conversation.
General curiosity?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a psychologist that wrote extensively about this concept of being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. It's called an autotelic personality. The autotelic personality is one in which a person performs acts because they are intrinsically rewarding, rather than to achieve external goals.[18] Csikszentmihalyi describes the autotelic personality as a trait possessed by individuals who can learn to enjoy situations that most other people would find miserable.
An autotelic person needs few material possessions and little entertainment, comfort, power, or fame because so much of what he or she does is already rewarding. Because such persons experience flow in work, in family life, when interacting with people, when eating, even when alone with nothing to do, they depend less on external rewards that keep others motivated to go on with a life of routines. They are more autonomous and independent because they cannot be as easily manipulated with threats or rewards from the outside. At the same time, they are more involved with everything around them because they are fully immersed in the current of life.[3]
If this doesn't sound like you, I recommend;
Think about the last time someone you didn't know made you comfortable. How did you feel before? After? What was said that made that happen?
Now think about a time someone made you uncomfortable. How did you feel before? After? What was said that made that happen?
Write it down in a notepad or note app and eventually, you’ll have a loose guide for how you interact with people day-to-day.
Find a pulse
Maybe I should say a flow, or, “getting in the zone.” Whatever it is, it’s a steady focus that comes in waves usually, only for a short period of time. You metaphorically see the world around you in slow motion. Time stands still, questions and answers are as fluid as a stream. You just have to get out of your own way when the opportunity knocks. This is where the magic happens, but just as quickly as it shows up, it’s gone. You can’t get it back again either. Diminishing returns are real…(This might seem abstract or esoteric, but stay with me)
Read about the “father of flow “ — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Synchronization of metronomes — Video
Regarding photography, every time I’d go into a new portrait session, I knew that there would be a point where I recognized I got the shot. I would feel it while it was happening. Eventually, everything I did before and after that flow had become fodder in preparation for it to happen. I started to get into a bad habit of expecting it to happen.
At first, I’d try to force it, but that only pushed the possibility further away. I went through a period of the yips at one point, where I questioned my abilities, raising my anxiety levels to the point where I couldn’t judge if what I was doing was good or not. I also was viewing basic tasks and jobs as extremely taxing, which put me as what I view as barely above functioning. I eventually got out of my rut and back into my flow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote extensively on the challenges of flow as well.
It’s like anything else, cognitive retention and it’s something that I practice daily. Whether it's cooking, cleaning out my closet, or writing, sampling, arranging a track of music —Setting Goals, Becoming Immersed in the Activity, Learning to Enjoy Immediate Experience — their exercises build the necessary muscle memory to have a better chance of executing in a flow state.
In Conclusion
If we can focus on making people feel heard, understood, and create a lasting emotional connection, our overarching goals to get the most honest and accurate information about the user’s behaviors and attitudes will come from a genuine and natural place. Being authentic and truly knowing what they feel and what they need, will better inform design decisions that could ultimately create a lasting emotional connection with our users.
Other resources and readings:
John Berger - Ways of Seeing Episode 1 — Video
Michelangelo Antonioni’s — Blow-Up
Interviewing Humans — Erika Hall
Open vs closed-ended questions in User Research — Nielsen Norman Group
The Watercourse Way — Alan Watts
