What’s new in the second edition of Interviewing Users? There’s a whole bunch of guest essays (or “sidebars”) so you can learn from a range of different experts. Video embedded below (or here).

Thanks to the sidebar contributors: Kate Towsey, Tamara Hale, Gregg Bernstein, Jorge Arango, Joyce Kakariyil Paul, Monal Chokshi, and Shima Houshyar for making the book better through your expertise.

Thanks to Larry Swanson for having me on his Content Strategy Insights podcast.

You can listen to our 30-minute conversation (and find the transcript and various links to podcast services) on the episode page. Also, the audio is embedded below

The episode is also on YouTube (and embedded below)

We talked about:

• my work at my 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

Excerpt:

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 so 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.

Kirkus Reviews just published a review of Interviewing Users, second edition. [You can purchase the book here].

An extraordinarily thorough and thoughtful introduction to the art of the research interview.

Portigal presents a comprehensive guide to conducting and analyzing user research interviews.

Conducting a professional interview, the author astutely observes, is not the same as casually “chatting”; in fact, a well-structured interview can be “fundamentally different” from an ordinary conversation. “Interviewing users involves a special set of skills. It takes work to develop these skills. The fact that it looks like an everyday act can actually make it harder to learn how to conduct a good interview because it’s easy to take false refuge in existing conversational approaches.” Portigal, who has 25 of years of experience as a researcher and consultant, rigorously anatomizes the chief structural elements of an interview—the formation of a plan, the interviews themselves, and the consequent analysis of the data yielded. The text covers a remarkable expanse of intellectual territory very concisely—the book is less than 300 pages long—especially considering that it includes guest essays from industry experts. With great clarity (the author never indulges gratuitously inaccessible jargon), Portigal walks readers through every constituent part of the interview process, from finding the participants to interpreting their answers. This is more than a technical field guide—the author deftly analyzes the human element of the interview as well, this “shared, unnatural experience” that can produce “something profoundly new” but can also be unsafe, awkward, and hostile. He details how to build a quick rapport with a stranger and empathetically encounter the interviewee as a “real live person in all their glorious complexity.” An effective interview requires more than a “toolkit” for asking questions—it demands a “way of being” that cultivates an undogmatic openness to others. While the focus of the book is on user research interviews, this guide will be helpful to anyone in a position to extract information from others in a professional environment.

An extraordinarily thorough and thoughtful introduction to the art of the research interview.

Over the past while I’ve been working with Jason Ulaszek of Inzovu to deliver a storytelling workshop to clients. After a number of successful experiences, we’re making it more widely available. Check out details at the Inzovu site

, highlights below.

Storytelling is an essential human skill for any team. It drives connections, influences decisions, and inspires empathy. Discover how powerful storytelling can unleash your team’s potential.

Integrate Storytelling Into Your Team’s Practice
In innovative and creative practices, the ability to tell a compelling story is just as crucial as doing the work itself. While good teams focus on delivering high-quality work, great teams go beyond and wrap the delivery of their work into stories. A team’s ability to tell well-crafted stories is a critical factor in influencing their success and achieving the outcomes they seek.

That’s where our storytelling workshops come in.

Benefit’s You’ll Get
Our storytelling workshops are designed to empower your team by enhancing their storytelling prowess.

Your team members will supercharge their ability to:

• Share stories of your customer’s experience, help build empathy, and influence decision-making
• Create a shared understanding for the vision or roadmap of your product or service
• Engage your audience by demonstrating your understanding of their unmet need or the values and benefits of your product or service
• Ignite a passion within your organization for what’s possible

This workshop is valuable for a range of roles and functions within growing product and service organizations including User Experience (UX) Design, Product Management, Marketing, and Innovation teams.

What To Expect
Depending on the format and your organization’s goals, you’ll:

• Practice, receive feedback, and improve your storytelling skills
• Prototype and iterate a story in a creative and collaborative environment
• Understand how to apply storytelling to organizational and team challenges (e.g., build a compelling narrative about user research insights, or explain a team’s function to the rest of the company)
  Advocate for storytelling as a force for cultural change
• Be able to choose between different storytelling formats that best suit the material, audience, and your own strengths

And, we’ll have fun together while learning a crucial skill.


Formats To Suit Every Need
No matter your industry or your type of team, our workshops are designed to enhance storytelling skills–whether that’s a series of short sessions, an in-person all-day workshop, or a multi-day activity.

• Virtual: A series of short sessions across three weeks, with individual and group assignments between virtual meetings. For virtual workshops, we typically meet once a week.
• In-person, one-day session: A one-day, in-person workshop where we will group participants throughout the day, explore storytelling formats together, and deliver a story at the end of the day.
• Custom story building: A custom workshop for your specific scenario that builds off our storytelling basics. Custom story building could be a one-day event or a multi-day activity depending on your needs.

I’ll be speaking at Chicago Camps Tent Talks on November 13 at 5 pm CT. It’ll be a short, live discussion about Interviewing Users, and it’ll be recorded and available online afterwards. Register for the session here

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Thanks to Chris Kovel for having me on the inaugural episode of his “In Dialogue” series on the Universal Lens Channel. For about 75 minutes, we talked about the state of user research in 2023.

The episode is on YouTube but the interview is audio only. The YouTube and audio versions are embedded below, and also available on YouTube and libsyn.

There’s a transcript available on YouTube.

You don’t have visibility into everything and so I think [a company’s user research maturity] needs sometimes a dedicated examination and consideration in order to to improve it. I guess that’s how I would make the case or because you know at a profession level there are things that we can do but ultimately the implementation is taking place inside companies and what it really looks like is very localized. Company A and Company B can learn from each other in terms of what their best practices are, what their struggles are, but it’s hyper local — we have this way of doing product management, we have this market, we have this maturity in our marketing business, we have this kind of product, this vertical — all those things are going to really change what it takes to build a more mature practice, and if you don’t locally examine it, and you know, what more mature looks like for company A is not what more mature looks like for Company B. So I think there is sort of an investment needed of time and focus and ideally an external perspective to try to see where strides can be made to to to yeah to move things to move things along.

It’s been 10 years since I wrote Interviewing Users, and I’m thrilled to announce the second edition! It comes out October 17th and is available for pre-order, at a 15% discount.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further—showing the methods and details behind asking questions—from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

Who Should Read This Book?

• Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
• Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
• Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you.

Bonus: read Chapter 1 here.

Aline Ferreira, a sociologist who is studying UX and UX research, read Interviewing Users and summarized it in Portuguese

(Planejamento e boas práticas de entrevista: o que aprendi com “Interviewing Users”, de Steve Portigal or Planning and good interview practices: what I learned from “Interviewing Users”, by Steve Portigal).

Com uma linguagem simples e concisa, o livro de Portigal é excelente para o público iniciante em UX, assim como para os mais experientes.

O livro “Interviewing Users”, de Steve Portigal, conta com dicas práticas sobre como entrevistar usuários em profundidade. Ele é excelente especialmente para aqueles que não têm muita experiência. Contudo, eu não tenho nenhuma dúvida de que seja um livro que contribui também com profissionais mais experientes.

Jennifer Rash interviewed me for DesignTalk, her blog.

I pulled out one part of our exchange, but there’s more and you should read the whole thing (it’s pretty short!):

What is your approach for discussing sensitive topics?
I can think of plenty of times where participants opened the door to an off-topic sensitive area (say, repeated, thinly-veiled references to being frustrated with a spouse) and I just left it alone, because it wasn’t germane to our focus. In general, It’s worth being clear with ourselves whether a topic might be uncomfortable for us or for our participants and not conflating the two. So I think there’s a combination of sensitivity for either party, and relevance that informs how if or how I proceed.

When we’re talking about sensitive topics, I’ll generally be neutral (maybe using body language to indicate I’m listening rather than an exclamation like “oh no!” that indicates I have my own emotions about what they’ve shared). My follow-ups may be neutral and direct (“What did you decide to do then?”) if I perceive my participant as comfortable, but if I’m going to be more cautious I can ask a projective question, where the question isn’t about them, but some other group of people.

Q: How have you seen other people in the community deal with that situation?
A: Well, when it happened to me, I decided to…

Making the question less direct sometimes prompts a response about them, but those cases, it was their choice to talk about themselves specifically rather than more broadly about other people.

I recently spoke about Boosting User Impact to the Product Makers community. The 47-minute video is embedded below, and on YouTube here.

Steve joined us to talk about how organizations can operate user research programs with greater maturity, engaging stakeholders to maximize influence and impact.

Event summary here

(registration required).