User Interviewing
The most important condition for doing our work is to understand the user as well as possible. This is why we often do interviews with key users from our clients' target groups. We do our best to get to the core of what a user needs and to understand as well as possible what they are up against.
Building understanding
A user interview is more than an informal chat, the quick sharing of an opinion or gauging a reaction to an elevator pitch. We want to collect data to base important design decisions on and use established methodologies to do so. We often do this as the very first effort in a new project, when we want to learn what a user is trying to accomplish and understand what works for them and what doesn't. We want to make sure we identify the right problems and only then get to work solving them.
Avoid suggestive or closed questions
We do our best to always be objective. We don't want to push a user in a direction or provoke a reaction. After all, by doing so, we don't collect honest feedback. Maybe what your user says is not at all consistent with what you had in mind. Fine! Then we can design for that. Retrieve as much information as possible and make sure your user is speaking the most, only "yes" or "no" does not give enough feedback.
Users don't know what they want
Important! A user often has no idea of what they want until they are presented with it. This is why we embrace our discipline and consider the conception and design of new features or a new product as a task for designers, not the user.
Keep your opinions to yourself
We are designers, so we have strong opinions about how digital products should work. However, we always keep those to ourselves in an interview. We do not want to influence a user at this stage and are always neutral. Our opinion does not matter at this stage, so we listen especially carefully.
Bring your basic questions
We are not focused on putting a complete product live, but on getting as small a version as possible, live as quickly as possible so that we can learn more. And can keep improving. In other words, a Mininum Viable Product. Going live is not a success in itself. Only a good user experience is.