Field Notes from Google’s Customer Experience (CX) Lab

User interviews are a lot of fun to do. It’s exciting to see someone outside of the product development team interact with whatever product you’re working on, especially if it’s new. Reactions from new users can be unpredictable, or satisfying, or helpful, or any number of additional adjectives. While at Google, the team I worked with helped with formative and summative research on new products for business owners and managers, a very unique subset that I personally enjoy working with. These users are the passionate, power users that care about having their voices heard — better than the average user who doesn’t really notice any improvement in the product you work so hard on creating. As people, they’re knowledgable, fun to speak with, and usually a joy to be around.

All that said, there are some caveats I have to warn you about. Owning a business means this person is usually solicited by sales people on a daily basis, so usually your first interaction will go something like this:

“Hi, can I speak with the owner or manager?”

“No, they aren’t interested in whatever you’re selling”

“Actually, I’m part of the research team here at [company], and just had a few ” *click* — front desk just hung up on you.

Don’t be discouraged. It happens, and you’d probably do the same thing in their position. Send an email explaining why you’re calling, try again at a better time. Don’t call during lunch or dinner rush, and Fridays are a better day to set up an interview than you’d expect.

Business owners are an incredible source of insight when building digital products. They’re most often the main users of the interface, and even better, they aren’t afraid to tell you what they’re thinking. The troubling part is that for the same reason they’re so valuable to talk to, they’re as difficult to get a hold of. Here’s what you can expect when contacting and working to recruit users for interviews, surveys, and pilot programs:

• When contacting businesses, make the benefit clear for them. If you have an incentive, that’s helpful, but the real convincing will come with the other benefits — early access to new material that may provide a competitive edge, a direct improvement to a feature they really want, or even just being able to talk to someone (who isn’t customer support or sales) at the company. Whatever you go with, it will depend on the type of person you’re speaking with and what you perceive the biggest benefit will be for them. This is the sales part.
• Calling is the best method, or in person. Email is easy to ignore, and a very passive form of communication.
• Rescheduling appointments 2–6x over. Business owners have to fight fires everyday of the week. The more understanding you can be, the more flexible you keep your schedule, the more they’ll appreciate it and try to work with you. Also, start about a week or so before you need to have the interviews done.

Patience is a virtue. For many business owners, the online tools they use to accomplish their day to day goals is decided based on the following criteria; saving time, dealing with a short learning curve, and seeing an immediate return on investment. Interestingly, I wouldn’t include price on this list — many business owners know what a good marketing or management tool is worth, and are more than willing to pay the price within reason. (Of course, don’t take my word for it without asking your users what they think first, but if your tool solves a specific problem well, you shouldn’t have to worry about pricing. )

A side note about customer experience (CX) vs user experience (UX). Business owners need to worry about their needs, and their customer’s needs — which means you, as the product person, need to worry about both. How does this video look to an end customer (CX)? Will the business owner be able to shoot and edit it without making it too long or too short (UX)? Youtube Director , one of the projects I was on, tackled some of those particular questions, and is a great example of a tool with two types of end users.

So we’ve talked about patience, and sales. Next up: observation. More of this is covered in part 2, where I’ll talk about methods for conducting the actual interview — planning, set up, running with it, post script, follow up.

Part 2 will cover the interview itself — how to plan for it, run it, what to do.

Part 3 will cover qualitative analysis, and how to present the findings (especially when working with qualitative data and large, open ended answers)