Steve Portigal: Interviewing Users – Episode 167

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To conduct a good research-focused interview, you need to cultivate a professional interviewing mindset.

Steve Portigal has been doing this for years, and he has written a book to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews.

Now in its second edition, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (available at a 20% discount through December 15 by applying the code ELLESS at checkout), covers interviewing techniques, of course, but also research best practices, how to document your work, and how to make sense of your discoveries.

We talked about:

• his work at his UX research consultancy
• the elements of a good interviewing mindset
  1. checking your own world view at the door
  2. embracing how others see the world
  3. building rapport
  4. listening
• the difference between chatting and interviewing
• how to stay mindful as you transition from one mode of communication to another, and the need to consciously cultivate new rituals in the modern, non-stop Zoom world
• how to keep the business intent of your interviewing activities in mind, in particular the relationship between the business opportunity at hand and the research-question planning that best aligns with it
• how to kindly share with colleagues relevant new discoveries that emerge in your research work
• how to balance the amount of domain knowledge you bring to an interviewing project
• the importance of knowing and keeping in mind the scope and importance of documenting, analyzing, and synthesizing your interviews

Steve’s bio

Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher who helps organizations to build more mature user research practices. Based outside of San Francisco, he is principal of Portigal Consulting, and has conducted research with thoracic surgeons, families eating breakfast, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and real estate agents. His work has informed the development of professional audio gear, wine packaging, medical information systems, design systems, video-conferencing technology, and music streaming services.

He is the author of three books: the classic Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights (now in a second edition) and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. He’s also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations.

Connect with Steve online

• LinkedIn
• Portigal.com

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 167. Talking with another person is the most natural thing in the world. But when you’re interviewing someone for a business-focused research project you have to set aside many of your natural conversational instincts and adopt a professional interviewing mindset. Steve Portigal has been doing this for years. He’s also written a book to help to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews and discover new opportunities and actionable insights.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 167 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Steve Portigal. Steve is probably the best known interviewing expert in our field, and he’s a user research consultant in the Bay Area. Welcome, Steve. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.

Steve:
Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s nice to be here with you and get to talk to everybody. I run a research consulting practice. I’ve been doing that for a little more than 20 years, which is a long time, but been learning and learning and lots more to learn. And I learn through different kinds of work. I run research studies, I work with clients and help them learn things about their users and their customers and figure out what we’re going to do about it. I teach teams to be better at doing research, elevate the user research maturity of their practice, that’s researchers and the other people in the organization who do research.

Steve:
And yeah, I do a lot of workshops and facilitation and helping teams get unstuck on whatever issues they have going on. Sometimes that’s really directly related to the work of user research that I think we’ll probably talk about today, but sometimes it’s about other things as well. I’ve helped teams with storytelling. I’ve helped them with trying to change the dynamics in their organization around the research. Anyone that’s a consultant knows, “Oh, we’ve got to help our clients figure out their problems and come in and be creative with them about how we can address their problems.” But the baseline I think is always about understanding customers and users, and how we do something with that.

Larry:
Yeah. And that’s why we have user researchers and love you all so much. At least I do. I think most of our colleagues do, but we don’t always have access to you. And one of the things, the reason I wanted to have you on the show now is that you just revised your book, ‘Interviewing Users’. It’s out in its second edition now, and a lot of us are tasked with that specific part of doing user research and don’t have the training and background that you do. So we really appreciate the book. And one of the things I’m hoping to talk about is just how… We’re obviously not going to be you anytime soon, but how to cultivate that mindset that a good interviewer has. So what are the top characteristics that a person needs to get in that mindset?

Steve:
I think there are some fundamental skills, orientation, mindset, and I list four of them in the book as a recipe. One is about suspending your view of the world, check your worldview at the door is the first one. So, you work on a problem, you work for a team, you work on something that’s got you out there trying to learn from people, doing some interviews. So trying to set that aside. You have maybe hopes, aspirations, pressure on you from the rest of the organization. And we can be very kind and call these hypotheses. Sometimes they’re not formalized as hypotheses, they’re just assumptions, organizational truths. So, one thing to do is to just set those aside. Don’t dismiss them. They exist, they’re part of you, but to be fair to yourself, how do you just create a little space, set them in that space and then go talk to somebody. You can always pick them up when you come back.

Steve:
The second one is embrace how other people see the world, which is the corollary. So I’m going to take my worldview and I’m just going to set it aside, but I have to embrace how other people see the world. And I think that verb embrace is really, really important. I picked a word that’s very active, almost aggressive, like the bear hug. It’s not be tolerant of or receptive of or even be curious about. It’s embrace. It’s like, Go get that view that somebody else has and really just grab it and pull it in towards you, so you really bring this new piece in.

Steve:
And then three and four are kind of related. Three is about building rapport, and that’s the difference between asking a bunch of questions in sequence and having a conversation where it builds and grows and you’re not forcing someone to tell you something, you are creating space for them that they are filling, because they want to give you insight and information about themselves. So that’s the whole dynamic of a great interview.

Steve:
And the fourth one is listening and an obvious one, but for the naive person, listening is what we are told as kids. Mouth shut, ears open. But we have phrases like active listening, all the things that we do to show that we’re listening, all the ways that we ask questions. So there’s lots of tactics for all of those, but I don’t need to go on too long. But as a mindset, it’s set aside your worldview, embrace their worldview, build rapport and listen, are the fundamental elements that I think can make someone be much more effective in talking to other people to learn from them.

Larry:
In all those, especially the second one, the embracing their worldview, that really speaks to the empathy that we’re all eager to bring to the table. And so, I love that framework. One of the things somewhere in there, it reminded me, part of that mindset is one of the things you talk about in the book is going from chatting to interviewing. And I love that and I think I feel it right away, but can you talk a little bit about the difference between those and how to make the transition if you find yourself chatting?

Steve:
Yeah. And chatting is, it’s a crutch. And I don’t mean that in an unkind way. If people haven’t spent time learning this and practicing it and reflecting on it, I think people go pretty far by being friendly and open and conversational, and I think that’s a good start. But in chatting, for example, we share about ourselves, “Oh, you like cats? Well, I also like cats and I have two cats at home and one is named Binky and one is named Winky.” That’s seen as, it’s a chatty rapport building technique. And I think that’s one I see people relying on and I don’t think they should ultimately, that the interview is about the other person and that…

Steve:
So, yeah, if you’re new, you tend to think, “Oh, I can build rapport with you by showing you how I am like you.” “I like that too. I hate that too. Oh, that happened to me. My cousin also has that problem with Facebook,” whatever the thing is, you try to share something about yourself, but actually that takes focus away from the other person. So that embracing how they see the world means you want to spend time on them. So when someone says, “I have two cats,” you can say, “What are your cats’ names? When did you get them? Are cats part of the content that you share on social media?” If that was our topic. You can keep talking about the thing that they shared and not bring yourself into it. And you have permission not to talk about yourself and you have power to be still interested in their thing. And it actually is much more effective.

Steve:
The interview is about this other person, so keep making it about that person, keep going back to them, keep yourself out of it. And so that’s very different than chatting. Chatting, you would share about yourself as a way to make it feel equal, but actually your goal is not to have them learn about you. Your goal is to learn as much as possible about that other person. So, it’s counterintuitive. You can still be friendly by being interested in them. And I think if we think about, and this is different for introverts and extroverts, but if we think about dinner parties or dates or whatever kind of situations we find ourselves in, sometimes you find yourself just asking questions and realizing that like, “Oh, it actually can go really smoothly without sharing about yourself.”

Steve:
So I think it’s a different way of being, is to be really interested in them and keep yourself out of it I’d say 98%. I’m making that number up, but the interview rarely requires you to share something about yourself, even if you feel like, “Oh, I want to tell them about my cats as well.” I think you can have that feeling and just… That goes in the same closet that you put your worldview in, like, “I don’t have to tell them about my company’s plans. I don’t have to tell them about my cats. We can be very successful here by me choosing not to go to those defaults things to share or things to offer.”

Larry:
As you were talking about that, I’m thinking, because everything you say is easy to understand and you can picture thinking about how to apply that, but in the moment, a lot of people like me, I’m going to revert to chatting, because that’s just like… I’m hardwired for that. But one thing that works, and again, I might be projecting here, but having rituals about this. As you walk into an interview, having maybe physical or mental or even procedural rituals as you walk into a… Like, the difference between walking into a professional interview and a lunch date with a friend. Got any tricks like that? Or ideas about that?

Steve:
Yeah, I like the word ritual and you’re talking about transitions; how we go from one mode… You’re talking about rituals that would apply to two analogous situations, but that are slightly different. But you’re also talking about before we’re in that, and then as we go into it, and I think because of COVID and lockdowns and so much work happens through the medium that you and I are, we’re in Zoom right now. So much work happens in this medium, so much user research, talking to customers happens here. And my fear is that people are in computer, laptop, home office, Zoom mode all day and they go from, I don’t know, a one-on-one with their manager or a team meeting, where everybody’s showing off their new hats, because it’s Friday, and they hang that up at two minutes before the hour and then they just open up the next Zoom window and it’s an interview.

Steve:
So, I haven’t really answered your question. I’ll just say the pressure on us to transition between different modes of being I think is so much harder. Like you said, oh, we walk into something, but so much work is actually no longer, and we’ll see how this changes over the next few years, it’s not literally walking into something, where… I grew up driving to people’s homes in the Bay Area to do research locally or going to another city, and you had a lot of ritual and transition time; driving, navigating with the maps, parking, unloading the car, getting your team together and just saying, “All right, we’re going to go talk to so-and-so. What do we know about them?” Or, “We have three facts about them. All right, let’s go ring the doorbell.” That gave you a lot of transition time. And even if that was not an explicit ritual, I think you can be very intentional and say like, “All right, everybody, let’s set aside our goals. Let’s just spend time learning about Marnie for the next 30 minutes, the next 60 minutes.” We can have these explicit rituals, but we had functional transitions that were happening, because of the nature of the work. And I really worry about people hanging up one thing and going into the next thing without just clearing their head and breathing and reorienting themselves to the way of being.

Steve:
If you’ve got to perform for your team or be very reflective, because you’re having a very personal conversation, that is a very different energy and you need some time. Stand up, stretch, go to the bathroom, get a drink of water, replenish your tea, whatever that is, be very… I don’t really care about the rituals specifically, as much as that it gives yourself some space to move between different ways of being and having some intention with how you want to set yourself, how you want to feel about going into this new thing. So if you’re going to talk about yourself in A, and not talk about yourself in B, or vice versa, you need to be fair to yourself in order to give yourself space for that.

Larry:
Yeah. That notion that the lacking of cues to help us understand and articulate and contextualize our intent, it’s all missing. We’re all just in this flat screen all day. We’re kind of aware of that and we kind of feel it, but the way you just said that, that’s super helpful. Thanks.

Larry:
It also reminds me, as you were talking about that, it’s like you show up at a place, like in the old days, you drive up and you’re in the car with a team, and that’s a good reminder that this is a business activity. And in fact you open the book with a chapter about business and the business intent of your interviews. And I also like that you close the book with a chapter on impact, which I assume is about the measurement and the assessment, satisfying that business intent. Was that book ending intentional or am I just reading into that?

Steve:
This is where I just laugh confidently, say, “Oh, of course. You saw my organizing scheme.” I hadn’t thought about it as book ending, which that’s a little bit of nice reflecting back. In some ways, I think I was just following a chronology, like; why are we doing this? How do we do it? And then what happens with that? So, bookending is a much… I’m going to use that now. I bookended… The next person I talk to, I’ll explain how I bookended it with these two pieces. So no, but sure.

Larry:
Yeah. No, sorry, I didn’t mean to project on that. But anyhow, that’s the… Maybe just focusing on the business part of it, because I think that’s something that’s come to the fore in the content design world in particular the last couple of years is I think it might have to do with the economic environment we’re in, but also even before that, there were people talking about increasing concern with the ROI of our work and alignment with business values. And maybe we’re focusing too much on the customer and not balancing that, but how do you balance or plant your business intent in your head, as you go into an interviewing project?

Steve:
I think it kind of… Maybe it’s like a sine wave where it comes in and out. We were just talking about transitioning into talking to Marnie, a hypothetical person, for 30 minutes. I really want people’s business intent to be absent during that interview. So that’s maybe the lower part of a curve. But leading up to that, who are we going to talk to? What are we going to talk to them about? Who’s going to come with us? That’s very much rooted in what’s the… I don’t know why I made up this metaphor of the sign wave, but now we’re very highly indexed on the business aspect of it. We designed this project to address some context that we see in the business, either a request or an opportunity that we proactively identify. So we think about what decisions have to be made, what knowledge gaps are there. What’s being produced and what will we need to help inform decisions between different paths coming up?

Steve:
And so I talk in the book about a business opportunity or a business question and a research question. So what do we, as an organization, what decisions or tasks are coming up for us? So what do we have to do? We want to launch a new X, we’re revising our Q, we need to make sure that people doing these and these things have this and this kind of information. That’s about us. And then from that, you can produce a research question. We need to learn from other people, our users, our customers, people downstream from them, whatever that is. We need to learn from them this information, so that we can then make an intelligent response to this business challenge that we’re faced with. So all the planning, all the logistics, all the tactics, what method are we going to use? What sample are we going to create? What questions are we going to ask? What collateral are we going to produce to evaluate or to use as stimulus or prompting? All that is all coming from what does the business need and how are we going to go at it?

Steve:
And so I guess there still is a sign wave. So then we step that aside to talk to Marnie, to talk to everybody. We really embrace them. Then we have all this data, we have to make sense of this data. And then here, I think we straddle a little bit, because you’re going to answer the questions you started out with. I think if you do a reasonable job, you’re going to have a point of view about all the things that you wanted to learn about, but you always learn something that you didn’t know that you didn’t know beforehand. And I think this goes to the impact piece, this goes to the business thing that’s behind all this. What do you do with what we didn’t know that we didn’t know? I want there to be this universal truth like, “Oh, if you just show people the real opportunity, then they’ll embrace it,” and then everybody makes a billion dollars and the product is successful.

Steve:
I think that principle from improv of, ‘Yes, and,” I think we have to meet our brief. We’re asked to have a perspective on something. Part of the politics or the compassion way of having impact is to not leave our teammates and stakeholders in the lurch. So, we have these questions, we have answers to these questions. And also, we feel like there’s some other questions that we should have been asking. We want to challenge how we framed this business question to begin with. We see there’s new opportunities. We see there’s insights here that other teams outside the scope of this initiative can benefit from. There’s all sorts of other stuff that you get, and I think it behooves us to be kind about how we bring that up, because no one necessarily wants a project or a thing to think about that they didn’t ask for. So how do you find the learning ready moment or create that moment or find the advocate that can utilize the more that you learn, that can have even more impact on the business. That’s not a single moment, that’s an ongoing effort, part of the dynamic that you have for the rest of the organization.

Larry:
Yeah, you’re making me think now that there’s a meta level of that checking your worldview at the door. You’ve still got the research question and you still have a business goal that you’re moving towards, but all the details are still open to discovery, and it’s really interesting how much you need to know to go into this and how little you want to hold in your head as you do it. Does that make sense?

Steve:
Yes. Yeah. And I would expect that, especially for content people, they’re often in very complex domains with lots of different kinds of information that’s being used to do a lot of different kinds of tasks. So, sometimes the work of user research can be about simple, but profound things. And sometimes increasingly it’s about extremely, complex, detailed, sometimes very technical amounts of information, large, very complex processes. And so I think that sometimes that setting it aside is actually a necessity, because you can’t be an expert in everything. So having some of our own wisdom about, What do we capture, but not understand in the moment that we can go back to. What’s the right amount of dangerous domain knowledge? And dangerous, I kind of say with air quotes. What’s the right amount of knowledge? So that we can confidently ask questions about things that we are not experts in ourselves. And that is an interesting balancing act, I think as where we find ourselves doing research has evolved over a few decades. I don’t know. I think people are grappling with that in interesting ways right now.

Larry:
And you talk about that from one direction in the book that I think, I can’t remember which chapter, the making sense of it all, the analysis of what you got and the synthesis and making recommendations and all that stuff. And also associated with that, I think it was right before that was the chapter on documentation. So this gathering what you got and did and then making sense of it, that’s kind of where it all comes together, right?

Steve:
Yes. And I think there sometimes is a lack of… Well, a lack of awareness of that takes some effort that if you talk to somebody, let’s say I’m going to go talk to four or five customers this week, that I can walk away from each one independently with next steps, to-dos, conclusions. This is where the word insights gets used, like, “Come back and type up your insights.” I think that’s an abuse of the term insight. I get kind of huffy about it. I think it’s easy for us to fall into the role of stenographers, take feature requests. Ask somebody what they want it to be, have them tell us, tabulate it and maybe we have to figure out, “Well, what if customer A has something different than customer B? What do we put in the product?” That’s not what this is about, and you talk about it all coming together, you have to document it.

Steve:
So even a tactical thing, if you don’t record your interviews, you’re requiring on your own heavily biased memory. And that’s not a failing of us as a person. We are biased. We hear things that magnify or distort, we’re making sense while we’re listening and that changes things. The difference between 50 and 15 is the thing that you don’t get until you go back and listen. You’re like, “Oh, they said 15. I didn’t literally hear it.”

Steve:
I think I used an example in the book from an actual interview I did where someone talked, or we were talking about something, maybe commuting or something like that. And someone said, they were talking about their partner. They said, “Oh, one of us takes the New Yorker to work.” And I can’t remember what it actually turned out to be, but there were two very obvious interpretations. One was, “I’m taking the train to commute, so I bring the New Yorker magazine to read.” And then the other was the model of car that they had one car or they had a good car and a bad car. And one of those was like a, is it a, Chrysler? I don’t know, some Chrysler New Yorker or something like that.

Steve:
And in the moment, you can walk away saying like, “Oh, that person takes their magazine to read.” And that was a takeaway for us. But when you go back and really think about, “What do we think they were saying,” it was actually something completely unrelated, so that’s a spurious conclusion that you draw if you don’t have that documentation, you don’t have that actual recording to go back. And even so, it still requires some figuring out, like; what do they really, really mean there? So you need that documentation, you need that actual stuff that people had. And yes, this is where it comes together, where you spend time, quite a bit of time doing this analysis, which at a high level analysis is taking a large amount of stuff and breaking it down into smaller elements as a way of making sense.

Steve:
And then you do the synthesis. You take these smaller elements and arrange them into something new: frameworks, theories, insights. This is where insights come from, new views of the world. That analysis and synthesis, it’s documentation intensive and it consumes time. But that’s where, I like what you said, it all comes together. Most of the value in the research comes from that. It’s the iceberg. Go talk to somebody, ask them some questions. They tell you some things. You’re like, “Oh, that’s kind of interesting.” You’re just above the water, but all the volume is below the water and it takes this digging to pull that out. But that is where… It depends on the project, but I think in general, that’s where just some fantastic stuff lies that we didn’t know that we didn’t know, and now we have a way to talk about it that’s very precise and nuanced and has impact on the kinds of decisions that we’re going to be making.

Larry:
Great. And that’s a fantastic summary of the benefits of everything you’ve talked about. But hey Steve, I can’t believe it, we’re coming up close to time. These conversations always go way too fast. But before we wrap, is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation that you want to revisit or that’s just on your mind that you want to make sure we share?

Steve:
I want to just talk a little bit about people. I’ve talked about, oh, people for whom this is new or this is not. You even said at the beginning; not everyone is a decades-long user researcher, and I think you and I are talking about some high level things. I guess I want people to feel like it’s okay to practice this stuff and to see what your own chatting impulse is. And I guess I would ask people to just be reflective on themselves. Like, “Okay, now, I fell back on chatting this time, even though you said not to. I want them to feel positive about and empowered.” I am saying here, “Don’t be a chatterer, be an interviewer, be a listener.” But if someone has an interview and they realize, “Oh yeah, I’m chatting,” that is a wonderful outcome, because now this is such a personal activity. It’s a lot inside your head. It’s using words and thoughts and silences, reflecting a little bit on what choices you’re making and maybe thinking that there are different ways that you could approach these things and try them, and just being okay with… I said at the beginning, I never stop learning. That’s I think my hope for anyone listening to this is try it, reflect on it, be kind to yourself, practice these things, and that’s how you get better and feel more confident about what you’re doing with this.

Larry:
Fantastic. Thanks. And I do want to point out, as you were saying that, I was reminded of a bunch of stuff in the book that we didn’t get to. There’s practical hands-on tips about dealing with reticent interviewees and taking props to interview. There’s a whole bunch of things that seem like maybe, not training wheels, but aids in getting to that mindset and that approach you were just talking about. Hey, one very last thing, Steve, what’s the best way for people to stay in touch if they want to follow you online or connect there?

Steve:
Yeah, if you have my name, then you have the way to find me. My website is portigal.com and I’m on LinkedIn under Steve Portigal. Those are probably the two most relevant and active places I think, to look for me on the interwebs.

Larry:
Cool. I’ll put those in the show notes as well. Thanks so much, Steve. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Steve:
Me too. Thank you for the great questions and discussion.