It's fatiguing (and sometimes disheartening)

Running interviews can be tiring between attentive listening, taking notes, reacting, probing into responses, and carefully jumping from topic-to-topic. Even a handful of 30-minute interviews can leave you fatigued.

You can learn about yourself just as much as you learn from your participants.

When you conduct interviews across different qualitative studies, you start to learn more about what's important to the people you build for. You're talking directly with people or even visiting them in their place of work or their homes. Besides collecting high-quality data, interviews can expose you to negative, traumatic, or even violent experiences that your participants experience.

Building products can do much good for the world, but you'll also be confronted with many unintended consequences of those same products. Over time, you can become burnt out or experience some level of emotional burnout.

If you spend all of your sessions hearing about complaints or negative experiences, it can start to change how you view the product, the company, or even the world. Imagine working at a company that provides patient management tools for in-home health care nurses. If you're conducting in-home observations, you might notice that not every patient lives in a clean or stable home. Do you make recommendations that challenge these conditions, or do you stick with what's technically feasible for your stakeholders or business?

There isn't one perfect answer, but it should make you stop and think about how your interviews influence you. You’re uniquely positioned to both humanize “users” and build meaningful experiences for them. If you have the power to speak up and challenge the negative externalities of your company, you have a professional obligation to do so. Check out this podcast episode with Vivianne Castillo, the founder of HmntyCntrd (Humanity Centered) on self-care as an experience research.

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Silence isn't Easy

When interviewing, your goal is to let each participant speak their mind clearly and fully. One way to do this is by being silent when they are talking. Being silent and using silence effectively is, ironically, easier said than done.

It's hard to know when to speak and when to listen because unlike you, participants aren’t following a script. They're not following your interview guide, they don't always speak in complete sentences, or they might ramble much longer than you'd like. It's also hard to know if someone is done talking or taking a moment to collect their thoughts.

Ironically, silence is easier said than done.

While it can be hard to do, your goal should be to learn how to use pauses effectively in each interview. For example, when you're building rapport (jump to this Topic for more), you can realize how talkative or quiet your participant is.

If someone is talkative, then you have to wait to respond. But if someone is quieter, you might have to ask probing questions to keep the conversation going. The most effective and uncomfortable technique is to wait for a participant to speak. The silence can give participants the space to complete their thoughts fully.

Below are three strategies that teach you to use silence effectively in your next interviews. If you need, you can even combine and use all three strategies in one interview.

Strategy 1 – Blame the Machine

• At the start of the interview, get consent to record the interview.
• Set the expectation that you’ll be uncomfortably silent during the session.
• Explain that your recording tool or software is trying to transcribe this entire session so you can take fewer notes and review specific responses later (you can mention this even if your recording tool can only record but not transcribe).
• Tell the participant that if two people talk at the same time (aka if you talk over or interrupt the participant), then the transcription won’t work and that you’ll have to manually transcribe the entire interview if it doesn’t.
• Clarify if the participant understands and start your interview.

Strategy 2 – The Five-Second Rule

• Mentally count to five when you believe a participant has completed their response.
• If the participant starts talking again, start the count again. Repeat as needed.

Strategy 3 – Last-to-Start:

• When you believe a participant has completed their response, start your next sentence or question with their last word, phrase, or sentence (see example below).
• If the participant starts talking while you’re figuring out what to say, wait and listen again (an example is below).

Participant: They’ve got these new contactless registers, y’know. You just tap your phone -- on the back, I think, or maybe the front, I forget -- and it knows who you are. You load your account with some money or even a credit card? I’m not sure. But it gives you rewards points.”

Researcher: [silence] “Get reward points? How do those points work?”

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Your Research Character Matters

Take a moment to think about how you act in your daily life. Are you funny? Are you quiet? Are you curious? While you want to be cautious about bringing your entire worldview into an interview, you do want to be seen as a real, genuine person by your participants.

Good interviews aren't about being robotic. You do want to bring in parts of your personality to the interview. You can talk with your hands, or you can make light jokes when appropriate if you're typically humorous. Make the entire interaction less of an interrogation and more of a casual conversation. Bring in parts of your personality to build rapport or keep the energy up during longer interviews.

There’s a fine line between being completely professional and being completely personal.

Be aware of how you come across to each participant. If you're talkative in real life, then you'll have to work on limiting your speaking. If you're rather quiet, then you might have to find opportunities to respond to what someone says meaningfully. There's a fine line between being completely silent or professional and completely yourself in every interview.

With practice and exposure to different groups of people, you'll start to recognize when to be more human in an interview. (This is another great reason to record and review your interviews). Check out this podcast episode from “What’s Wrong with UX?” hosts, Laura Klein and Kate on the idea of research characters.

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The participant can Be(come) Anyone

You’re sitting in your chair, your interview guide open on your computer screen, a nice tall glass of water by your side. You have an interview starting in the next 10 minutes, nothing fancy or special. You've interviewed people from this particular segment dozens of times. By their demographics, this next participant is pretty close to "average".

You might resonate with this situation, but this is the wrong type of thinking. No matter the information you have beforehand or your comfort, you never really know how any interview will go. If you start an interview with a closed or biased mindset, you're doing a disservice to yourself, your research, and most importantly, the person who took the time to talk with you.

If you run enough interviews, you'll find that the most amazing stories, insights, and learning can come from anyone – regardless of demographics. You'll eventually come to appreciate an important feeling: the feeling of being wrong and having your unique worldview challenged and expanded.

But interviews aren’t always picture-perfect. Interview "war stories" range from participants pulling out weapons and drugs to being yelled at or physically attacked.

Are these rare, extreme situations? Sure. But they happen, and as an interviewer, you have to be ready for an interview to go from uncomfortable to unsafe. You can read more about these negative experiences and how to handle them in this book.

Even if all of your past participants have always been calm and reasonable, there's nothing to guarantee that everyone will act the same way. Even if participants have similar demographic traits, you still never know how that person will show up in the interview.

Did they struggle to get to the interview location, making them frustrated? Were they able to eat enough today? Are they mentally present enough for an interview? Even the most innocent of questions can trigger a participant's negative or violent response, forcing you to react in real-time.

Don’t forget that you have the right to end any interview session

Please don’t forget that you have the right to end any interview session. While this is easier in remote interviews, it can be harder for in-person interviews. Try to schedule in-person interviews in public or professional spaces whenever you can. If you have to enter a potentially unsafe environment to conduct an interview, bring along a teammate to pose as your notetaker.

This isn't rock-solid advice because every situation is different. You matter more than the data, so respect yourself throughout the entire interview. And don’t’ forget that interviews can always be rescheduled or added.

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Handbook Closing Thoughts

Talking and learning directly from people, interviews are a fantastic method to use as a researcher. The depth you can study something, the stories participants recount, and the "human" side of working one-on-one can bring your research a level of richness that you might not ever get from other methods. Use them wisely and watch as your perspective on users expands quickly.

If you want to involve your stakeholders, take time to explain how interviews should balance conversation and guided dialogue. Exposing the non-obvious side of interviewing can help your stakeholders view you as a credible researcher, while also helping them realize that interviews blend science and art.

In the next Handbook, the most common quantitative UX research method gets broken down: the deceptively simple survey.