I wrote earlier about Michael Margolis’ Startup Lab workshop, in which he teaches attendees about “User research, quick and dirty”. Michael Margolis, UX Research Partner at Google Ventures covers user research topics such as user interview types and getting to the right learnings. He also offer a number of practical tips with respect to recruiting users and how to best conduct user interviews:
Recruiting users
Margolis mentions that recruiting 5 people to get feedback from is often sufficient, especially when you’re doing usability testing. He does stress that it’s worth the effort recruiting these people selectively and carefully, as this will help generate better results and avoid wasting time. Creating a simple participant screener document or survey is a good way to recruit the ‘right’ users (see an example in Fig. 1 below).
Fig. 1 – Ethnio.io screen survey example
Margolis lists a number of very helpful questions to feed into your screener document, in order to engage with the right users (and exclude those that aren’t right):
Users to include
- Who do you want to want to talk to?
- What exact criteria will identify the people you want to talk to?
- What screening questions will you ask? (questions shouldn’t reveal “right” answers)
Users to exclude
- Who do you want to want to exclude?
- What exact criteria will identify the people you want to exclude?
- What screening questions will you ask? (questions shouldn’t reveal “right” answers)
Conducting a user interview
Fig. 2 – Arc of a typical user interview
The representation of the user interview in the form of an arc, I probably found the most helpful aspect that Margolis (see Fig. 2 above). This arc really helps in structuring an interview, identifying the appropriate sequence of activities during the interview.
Main learning point: User research doesn’t have to be complicated, super time consuming or overly expensive. A huge thanks to Michael Margolis for sharing such a wealth of very useful and practical user research insights!
Related links for further learning:
As I learn ... 