Do you want to get better at talking to customers?
I just finished reading Interviewing Users. I'm putting together a cheat sheet that focuses on what's important for people building SaaS/digital products, so you can get 90% of the value in 10% of the reading time. Here's a quick overview:
What’s the book for
Focused on field researchers going out to do usability studies. This is a big industry and covers topics as broad as how people use software to what they eat for breakfast.
The focus is on formal, structured in-person user research (rather than remote).
It’s the opposite of the Mom Test which focuses on opportunistic, informal research.
3 highlights
- "Great interviewers leverage their natural style of interacting with people but make deliberate, specific choices about what to say, when to say it, how to say it, and when to say nothing. Doing this well is hard and takes years of practice."
- "Developing insights about users doesn’t always have to be a milestone in a product development process. Insights can be an organizational asset that is assembled quarterly (or whenever) to feed into all aspects of product development, marketing, and so on."
- Great practical details for field research studies, e.g.
- If you're going to use your phone to record audio, make sure you know what will happen if you receive a call or text
- If you're using a video recorder, buy a bigger battery
- How to place participants and the camera/microphone to get good quality audio/video
I'll be starting another book in the next few days, which do you want to see most?
- Deploy Empathy - Michele Hansen
- Talking to Humans - Giff Constable
- Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value - Teresa Torres
- Interviewing for research - Andrew Travers
- Practical Empathy - Indi Young
- Something else?
I've already done The Mom Test - that was the first one! https://twitter.com/iamtomelliot/status/1564625015043018753
