Product people! You'd love Cultural Probes in User Interviews

That awkward transition from small talk ("Hi! How are you? How's your week(end) been?") to the real interview ("My first question for you is..."). It's not absolutely painful, but definitely NOT my favorite part of a user interview.

How can we make these first few minutes of the interview less awkward? Better yet, how might we utilize these first few minutes to "warm up" our users and open them up for the actual interview?

Introducing... cultural probes

In our Design thinking class, my friends and I were running a semester-long project to solve a common problem among study abroad students. As part of our research, we wanted to know our users' goals for their semester-long study abroad experience.

In one of my interviews with a double major in Computer Science and English who was studying abroad in London, I began by asking her to...

Draw me your goals this semester!

She hesitated for a bit, then started drawing, all the while excused the "ugly" sketch (which I didn't think was the case!). After giggling at the result, she handed it over to me...

I pointed at the picture on the left: "Ooh... this looks interesting! Can you tell me more about it?" and effortlessly initiated the interview.

I later on found out that the picture on the left was a notebook which represented her goal to spend more time on writing and reading. Despite being an English major, her high workload in Computer Science prevented her from writing and reading as much as she wanted. The picture on the right represented her aspirations to explore Europe and the world.

It doesn't have to be drawing!

There's no one definition for cultural probes. They can be any activities that you ask your interviewee to do at the beginning of the interview that "tricks" them into opening up.

In a project that aimed to facilitating find the best travel buddies, the team showed their users 8 personnas with different personality trade-offs. They used the users' ranking of these imaginary travel buddies to started the conversation.

Another group, who aimed to support college students in balancing food budgeting and exploration while being abroad, asked people to guess the prices of different food items at the nearest grocery store. They later on examined how the discrepancy in their users' predictions and the actual prices affected food budgeting.

Why cultural probes?

Cultural probes are powerful because:

1. They distract your users from thinking about the interview and channeled their focus on an activity, and thereby, break the ice.
2. At the end of the cultural probes, you have people's thoughts laid out in front of you, and you can poke wherever you like.
3. An activity can elicit stories and emotions way better than a question can.

So, next time you have an user interview, try come up with a creative cultural probes and involve your users. You might have a lot of fun while learning so much more about your users.

Discussion

What other cultural probes do you use to warm up your users for an interview?