I always had a problem with user interviews as soon as the pandemic took over. Once I decided to talk to a senior about this. I said, “Field trips are rarely budgeted and timed at my company, especially if they were done the year before with the same audience.”

He took it up and explained 3 interesting methods which you can pick up.

The question:

How would you determine consumers’ needs, goals, and motivations without conducting expensive field research for each project?

I thought this was a fascinating issue because I believe many of us are in this situation right now. Even if our companies pay for field research, one of the issues is that if you’re on lockdown (essentially, if you reside on planet Earth), it’s impossible to go out and see users right now.

Field Research is gold.

So, what else could we do? First and foremost, I should state that field research — that is, traveling into your users’ environment — is the gold standard. That is precisely what you should strive for. That’s because context serves as a skeleton key to unlocking user requirements. When you dive into the context of the users, you’ll learn things that would be difficult to learn any other way.

However, what can you do instead if you’re in a position like the one we’re in now, where field research is complex?

These are three ideas. I hope each of which I believe adds value.
So, first and foremost, you may do diary research.

Diary Research

So, in a diary study, you ask people to keep a diary for you: a journal explaining how they go about engaging in the meaningful activity that you’re interested in researching. Of course, you can still give them a paper journal to fill out, but there are plenty of digital alternatives.

So, for example, dScout is a digital application that will run all of your sessions for you. However, you do not need to pay for a subscription service to conduct these kinds of investigations.

You can also request that your participants download apps from the app store.
DayOne, for example, is an example of this. Another one that comes to mind is Momento. Both programs also allow users to type text, snap photos of their surroundings, and record audio. And they can provide you detailed descriptions of how they go about doing the relevant activity you’re interested in. So there’s a diary study.

Remote Interviews

Another option is to conduct interviews. But, unfortunately, discussions can now be difficult. And the reason they’re problem is that we frequently ask consumers to recall events from the past during interviews.

And asking people to recall events from the past isn’t as effective as asking them to explain what they’re doing right now and observing their behavior. However, there are two approaches to conducting interviews that may be useful in this case. The first is an interview in the style of ‘Jobs To Be Done.’ So, ‘Jobs To Be Done’ was a strategy developed by Clayton Christensen to analyze consumer purchases better. However, we can easily adjust to comprehend how individuals live their lives and engage in significant activities.

Cognitive Interview

The way it works is that you conduct a cognitive interview.
A cognitive interview attempts to reintroduce people to the situation in which they were engaging in the behavior. So, for example, you might say things to people that don’t seem important at first, such as, “When was it? What time of day was it? What were your whereabouts? Who were you with at the time? What were you wearing at the time?” Those kinds of inquiries. They help you put individuals back when they are doing what you’re interested in and comprehending, even if they’re not relevant to understanding the activity itself. You take a step back in the process once you’ve gotten them back at that moment with the ‘Jobs To Be Done’ interview.

“What had happened before to that? What had transpired before that?” You can also take a step forward in the process.

So the concept is that it’s a highly systematic approach to assisting them in recalling specific memories. And there’s a technique called user experience mapping that’s related to that as well. Some employees at the UK’s GDS (Government Digital Services) devised this. And with that strategy, you ask folks to do something similar to what they would do in a ‘Jobs To Be Done’ interview.

However, they’re now putting each of those stages down on individual cards for you.

This is a fantastic strategy to use if you want to understand an experience that happens just once in a while or that you find challenging to witness live.

UX Mapping

Let’s imagine you’re interested in the experience of a driver who has broken down in their vehicle. That’s something you’d have a hard time seeing in person. You can’t indeed hire folks who are on the verge of collapsing. However, it is an experience you may be interested in, and you can utilize this strategy to get it. It’s similar to ‘Jobs To Be Done’ in that you ask them to tell you about their entire experience from beginning to end.

Then you choose a moment in that process — it doesn’t have to be the beginning, but it should be somewhere in there — and you ask someone to describe what happened. What was your impression of the experience? Was it a positive or terrible experience? Or how did that step go?

Then you ask them to repeat the process backward and forwards. What’s essential about this strategy is that you’re asking users to write down their experiences, which means you’re capturing their words and phrases and coming a little closer to understanding what happened from their perspective without having to over-interpret what happened.

So those three strategies — a diary study, a “Jobs To Be Done” interview, and user experience mapping — are all significantly less expensive than going out on a field visit. Again, I want to underline that getting into your users’ context is the gold standard — that’s where you learn stuff — but if you’re like most of us and can’t do it right now, you might find those tactics beneficial.