Love your respondent Add/remove

Purpose:

The purpose of love your respondent is to get to know your user on a more intimate level. This “method” is more to describe a way of communicating and acting with a user while doing field work than it is a specific method. It gives guiding tips on how to gain trust and build up a different layer of empathy than simply performing a regular user interview.

Step by step Facilitating tips

Tips to include participants who are not able to:

Focus

If participants have a hard time concentrating for the length of the interview, arrange little breaks or bring along a co-interviewer so that you can take turns asking questions and noting down.

Emote

For the interview it is crucial that participants try to sympathize with the interviewees. If this is difficult, talk about the interviewees' profiles in advance in groups and eg. make personas of them to awake sympathy.

If the user is not comfortable with overly excitement behavior make sure to adapt to the right mood

Speak

If participants can not speak, interviews could be conducted by bringing along a translator or a co-interviewer. Another possibility is to prepare an interview guide where the interviewees read from the guide and write down their answers.

Hear

If participants can not hear, interviews could be conducted by bringing along a translator or a co-interviewer. Another possibility is to prepare an interview guide where the interviewees read from the guide and write down their answers.

Think

If participants are overwhelmed by guiding the interview, make sure to set a lot of relevant questions, and questions to the answer of these, predefined. It might be necessary to bring a helper or team member that assists in writing down notes while conducting the interview.

See

If participants can not see, bring a helper or another group member if in groups to write down notes from the interview. Alternatively, bring an audio recorder and record the interview with permission from the interviewee. Afterwards, the participants' reflections can be recorded too.

Hold

If participants can not hold onto a pen, bring a helper or another group member if in groups to write down notes from the interview. Alternatively, bring an audio recorder and record the interview with permission from the interviewee. Afterwards, the participants' reflections can be recorded too.

Move

If participants can not move, bring a helper or another group member if in groups to write down notes from the interview. Alternatively, bring an audio recorder and record the interview with permission from the interviewee. Afterwards, the participants' reflections can be recorded too.

Touch

Input

Basic knowledge about the user

Output

Empiric data

Complexity

Moderate

Time

1-3 hours+

Participants

1-2

Activity

Communication
Reflective thinking

Step by step:

Find and meet up with your user
Ask compassionate questions to try to understand the disconnections between what we believe, what people say, and what they do.
Show excitement to talk to the user, and ask questions like if you were to get to know a date or a long lost friend.
Use encouragement to emphasize that the user should just say whatever they have in mind.
Use judgement as a way to reflect, without letting it influence the direction of the interview. Whenever judgement occurs, reflect and think of the gap between your perception/values and theirs.
Do not be afraid to expose your vulnerabilities and show your flaws. That way, people will be able to relate to you more and less reluctant to open up.

When doing this method you should consider:

Once you have established trust, they will be much more open to share things.
Do not push to hard for information the user is not comfortable with
If the user is not ready to open up try breaking the ice with your own experiences

Universal Design Guide