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The last fifteen seconds of an interview are sometimes the most insightful
How to address ‘doorknob questions’ that might give you crucial users insights
Sometimes, the last fifteen seconds of a user interview can be the most shocking and insightful.
One of your last user interview or testing questions is likely to be, “Is there anything else you would like to tell me about?” Most of the time, the user will likely say no or re-iterate an earlier point that they made, but sometimes that’s when they’ll drop a bombshell on you.
This is known in many fields as the doorknob question: someone’s halfway out the door when they ask a question or comment that adds a layer of complexity or urgency to the situation.
For example, one thing that I’ve encountered, right as the user was ready to pack up, was a baffling but straightforward comment: “I hope the new application supports copy and paste.”
Digging deeper, I found out that some text fields in the current application would mess up the formatting so severely that it was faster for users to re-type 500–1000 word statements they received through e-mail rather than fixing formatting after copy-pasting.
Users might not want to bring this up earlier in the interview for many reasons, such as wanting to be polite or expecting a task to address this earlier in the test. Still, these statements can often give you insights that would otherwise be completely hidden from you.
However, a little bit of preparation for structuring your user testing can make sure that you hear these statements when you have enough time to address them.
Flipping the script and giving yourself time
One of the most important things to do is to give yourself more room to work with (and make sure that you aren’t entirely taken by surprise), which is to change the wording of that question.
Instead of asking, “Is there anything else that you would like to tell me about?” ask the question phrased slightly differently:
“Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you think is important for me to know?”
