Everyone lies or interviews, which was not

Much has been written about the pros of an interview with a user, so we will bypass this topic. I want to describe that awkward moment when the interview seemed to be, and it seemed that there was no benefit from it.

Who watched the TV series "Doctor House", he will remember that the brilliant, lame doctor advised not to believe a single word of the patients.
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I am not a genius or even a doctor, but I still want to tell why it is good to speak with the user, but in some cases ineffective.

Examples and conclusions will be both their own and borrowed.

Some input: the company I work for is selling electronic and audio books. An interview is a short conversation with the user, which takes place at the beginning and at the end of the test. Talk for 10-15 minutes to learn a little about the person who uses our product.

Yes, but what will the pack say? ..

I already have two examples on this topic.

Example one:

Ask a question: How do you find and download e-books?
We get the answer: I always buy on your site.
In carrying out the case "Find and download a book on the road," almost everyone goes to storm the Internet with the request "... download for free."

I quietly conclude that the “Find and Download Free” case is much more familiar to them than the “Go to a familiar site and, as usual, buy the right book.”

Habits for a minute can not be undone. It would seem that there is such a thing. Admit that yes "Why pay more" and all in the same spirit, but no. I buy and that's it!

Example two:

The answer was the same for both the interview and the focus groups.
Question: What genres do you prefer?

The answers were leading such genres as classics, historical novels and fiction. Romance novels and literature a la Dontsova, by universal suffrage were thrown out on the margins of substandard literature.

For the purity of the experiment and driven by curiosity, asked the same question to friends. The answers were predictable.

Remembering the proverb “Trust, but verify,” I went to seek advice from the all-knowing Google.

It turned out that romance novels, according to different sources, migrate between the second and fifth places of popularity. And one online publication claims that “In 2016, in Russia, the most frequently bought books were Darya Dontsova and Tatyana Ustinova. By the number of copies sold, they overtook Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, the Russian Book Chamber calculated. ”
Question: Where are all these people hiding?

An example that is given as a classic "crowd effect":

The story about the Phillips boombox. Teenagers were invited to show them two new boomboxes (radio), one black and the other yellow. All as one, fashionable teenagers, pointed to black and said “fuu”. And yellow is cool and fashionable ... After the teenagers, they thanked and offered to take as a reward for spending time on bubmox. All black boom boxes were carried away by fashionable teens. All yellow remained to the organizers.

I wondered why this happens?

For myself, I found the answers to the following statements:

1. In the 1960s, A. Maslow, the founder of humanistic psychology, outlined the need for belonging to a group of people and considered that group membership is the dominant goal of a person.

2. Robert Cialdini in his book “The Psychology of Influence” described the principle of social proof, according to which a person determines what is right, figuring out what other people think is right. He considers his behavior to be right if he sees other people behaving in this way.

And I now think that sneakers from here and stick out. Therefore, the benefits of questions about personal tastes, preferences and the like, in my opinion, will be a little more than nothing.

Roofs, fences, always torn pants. Or does it seem to me, or was the world really different then?

I have no observations about the substitution of memories. They were described by Susan Wainshank in her book 100 New Basic Design Principles. The cases described seemed to me quite interesting and relevant to the topic. I share.

After testing various products, the author of the book asked the respondents to talk about what they thought and did during the testing process.

The person who tested the online store, in the process of testing disapprovingly expressed regarding the use of shades of purple. After testing, during the discussion, he stated that he really liked all the colors.

Another participant in the process of testing banking software was unable to perform a non-cash transfer of money and was so upset that she almost cried. But when discussing, she argued that using the site was very easy.

Susan Wainshank explains that memories are generated by the excitation of certain neurons. When a new memory is formed, new information is recorded in the brain. Extraction is also accompanied by brain arousal. Every time a person tries to extract information from the memory, it can change. Turning to his memory, a person creates it again, because this causes the excitation of new neurons. Each time you search for data in memory, the memory changes slightly.

People consider all memories the same, while there are many different types of memories. In this case, the autobiographical type of memory was used, that is, associated with the events of his own life. Updates accompanying each procedure of extracting data from memory to a conscious level entail errors. The memory is affected by everything that happens since its formation.

When testing, people created autobiographical memories, which means that they can remember the experience of working with the site not quite clearly even after a very short time.

Such is the result. “When the choir sings, the words are still not parsed. And the music is good "(c)

In this article, I do not vote for canceling the interview when testing. From it you can learn a lot of interesting and useful information. Listen, ask, compare words with actions and then the picture will become clearer.

In conclusion, the phrase that I really like: “Ask ten people what should be changed in the design of this door, then, most likely, you will receive ten different answers. Ask ten people to go out through this door, then you will see if it is clear from it, you need to pull or push it. ”