How well do you interview?

Steve Portigal (@steveportigal) author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights is next weeks podcast guest. Steve is fascinated by the stuff of a culture – its products, companies, consumers, media, and advertising. As he says, all these artifacts and the relationships between them are the rules that define a culture -- the stuff makes the culture, but it is the culture that makes the stuff. Read that twice and if you still need further explanation, Steve can be found at Portigal Consulting.

An excerpt from our podcast.

Joe: When I think of capturing the information in the interview, I think of two things, either I come in with my sixty-minute camera crew, or I go out in the car after the interview and write it down in a notepad what I just learned. Both have pros and cons, but is there a certain way, I should be capturing information or something you can help the listeners with?

Steve: I think you have two interesting things. One is a recording; let's call it a magnetic media. The other is interviewer's notes; their interpretations, their recall whether you take your notes afterwards or you take notes during. It is important to realize that as a note taker or someone who’s doing post interview recalling, you can't capture it all.

It goes through an enormous filter already, whether you're in real time or recalling, there's a huge amount of distortion. It's essential that you do have without getting to post-modern, the 100% accurate recording. A recording, the definitive doctrine of what happened, an audio recording or a video recording because what happens is you do have that distortion, you do remember something as being more dramatic. You remember that you heard something because you are thinking about something else.

There are all those things that come up and there's a big gulp between what was actually said. I challenge anyone to go back and watch an interview and compare your notes. You'll see sometimes critical, sometimes not, it depends on what the issues are. You'll see some big, big, big differences. You need to know for sure what they said. How many they said, if it's a list of things. What the sort of unstated pieces were? You would have to go back and tease that apart because it is not, you're not just interested on what's on the face on what's the word that comes out of their mouth are, you need to kind of dig into it a little bit more. That's why you need that definitive record and it doesn't have to be a sixty-minutes camera crew, it can be, when flip cameras were a thing, people were really kind of into those for their easiness portable HD quality hard disk cameras keep coming down in price and in size and I think, the quality of that, that or kind of an easy audio recorder, those things are so small as long as you have plenty of batteries, you can kind of set them and forget them and that would be what I would tend to do and recommend. You are not producing an Oscar nominated documentary on this. You're just going to capture a reasonable fidelity and then tools are available to that very, very well.

The thing I was going to come back to was that note taking process that you just described, whether you are doing during or doing it after, people find that really valuable as a way to kind of sort through. I can't see you right now, but I can imagine you scribbling things about what I am saying or someone listening to the two of us talk, might be kind of jotting notes. It a way that people process information and that filter, although, it distorting, it' also really important because that's the way that you start making sense and thinking about what the implications are. So, sitting down after an interview and saying to yourself or your colleagues what are the five most important things, what surprised you, you can facilitate that debrief or you can set yourself up to take notes during as a way to help you start processing all that information. But you still want to do some processing with that definitive record.