Atomic Spin

Jeff Patton and Lane Halley ran an Agile UX workshop for Atomic Object recently. One part of the workshop was the practice of user and stakeholder research through interviewing. For the exercise, we used a speculative development project that we’ve been researching for six months. We interviewed our office manager, Mary O’Neill, as the basis for one of the main personas for the project.

I didn’t expect to learn much from this interview about the project itself. After all, I’ve been thinking about this project, researching the opportunity, discussing it with many people, pitching investors, collaborating with our partners, and generally immersing myself in it for the last six months. On top of that, our office manager is also my wife, so I live with the interviewee and know very well her habits, goals and objectives concerning the subject of the project. How much more could I learn from a 30 minute interview? Lots, it turned out.

Interviewing Mary to craft a persona representing a user of the application we’re building turned out to be a rich vein of insights, surprises, new ideas, concerns and hidden opportunities. This experience brought home the value of the pair interviewing technique Lane taught. It also furthered my resolve to help our clients understand the value of this research. Learning so much, with so little effort, on something I already knew so well – how can this not be part of every project we do?