Interviewing Users

By Steve Portigal

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:** - Why interviewing is the foundation of user-centered design - How to prepare for interviews that yield genuine insight - The art of asking questions that reveal what people actually do and think - How to build rapport and navigate difficult interview moments - How to turn raw interview data into actionable opportunities - How to use research findings to drive organizational change

**Who This Book Is For:** Designers, product managers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and anyone who needs to understand people deeply in order to create products, services, or experiences that truly serve them.

Every product you have ever used was designed by someone who made assumptions about you. They assumed you would understand how it works. They assumed you would use it in a particular way. They assumed it would solve a problem you actually have. Sometimes those assumptions are correct. Often, they are spectacularly wrong. Consider the countless products that sit unused in drawers, the apps deleted within days of download, the services that frustrate rather than help. Behind each of these failures lies a common root cause: the people who made them did not truly understand the people they were making them for. This is not because designers and product teams are careless. Most genuinely want to create things that help people. The problem is that understanding other people is genuinely difficult. We are all trapped in our own perspectives, shaped by our own experiences, preferences, and assumptions. When we imagine what users need, we inevitably project our own worldview onto them. We assume that what works for us will work for them. We assume that our logic is universal logic. The antidote to this problem is not more data, more analytics, or more sophisticated technology. The antidote is conversation. Specifically, the antidote is the kind of deep, thoughtful conversation that happens in a well-conducted user interview. Steve Portigal has spent his career conducting these conversations. As a user researcher and consultant, he has sat in living rooms, offices, factories, and kitchens around the world, asking people about their lives, their work, their frustrations, and their aspirations. He has learned that the simple act of asking good questions and listening carefully can reveal insights that no amount of quantitative data could ever surface. But here is the uncomfortable truth that Portigal confronts head-on: most people are not naturally good at this. We think we know how to ask questions because we do it every day. We think we know how to listen because we have been doing it our whole lives. Yet when we sit down to interview a user, we discover that our questions lead to…