Visual notes from “Interviewing Users” by Steve Portigal
This post contains a sketch noted version of an exceptional user research resource.
Starting from May 2016 and until this year I probably spent 3–4 hours weekly talking to end users. In the beginning, I mostly built up domain knowledge and eventually started focusing on problem identification within existing workflows and concept review. For a while, I had no idea that what I was doing was in fact a combination of fundamental research and heuristic evaluation using concepts as well as actual software. I was, of course, making many many mistakes.
A lot of my current understanding of how to interview users has been achieved the hard way where I asked the wrong questions as well as asked questions the wrong way. Such blunders often resulted in wrong design decisions and features that had low user value. I started realizing that I was doing something wrong as I was getting more and more honest feedback from users (this is where relationship building is quite important as good relationships prompt people to be more candid with each other).
Reading Steve Portigal’s books on research as well as other literature like Continuous Discovery Habits, Interviewing Humans, Measuring the User Experience, Validating Product Ideas and of course observations of more experienced colleagues helped me discover my mistakes and hopefully improve my research skills.
I found out about Steve Portigal from a list of recommended user research and design books that Scott Sehlhorst had once shared with me. Lately, I have also been experimenting with visual notes as a technique to improve my perception of a certain subject. That led me to create visual notes on Teresa Torres’s “Continuous Discovery Habits”. Having seen that, Scott then suggested doing something similar to Steve Portigal’s book. I took that advice to heart (even though it took me ages to find time to reread the book and create visual notes).
Here is the abridged version of the book with all the concepts that carried the most of meaning for me. This book has a lot of practical advice on how to prepare for your user research project, how to conduct a quality user interview, and then what to do with collected data. The book gives a deserved focus on the types of questions worth asking during an interview together with frequent challenges and how to overcome them.
Next, I plan to read and create visual notes for Erica Hall’s “Just Enough Research”.
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