CHAPTER 4
WHAT THIS BOOK CAN HELP YOU DO
Perhaps you find yourself, either now or at other times, needing to do one of the following:
- Launch a product
- See if people would pay for something
- Understand why people are canceling
- Know why people are buying, so you can find more customers
- Determine which features to add next
- Figure out how to keep customers and why people buy again
- If any of those apply to you, this book is for you.
This book is intended to make the tribal knowledge about talking to users that is largely constrained to the user research community accessible to a much broader audience.
This book is written for people who do not come from a user experience background. That includes everyone from developers to product managers to marketers to founders.
If you do have experience with interviewing, this book’s primary usefulness to you may be as a resource to recommend to developers, product managers, and other team members as an introduction to interviewing that is approachable yet rigorously grounded.
This book is in part inspired by a line in veteran user researcher Steve Portigal’s book Interviewing Users: “Much of this presumes that the fieldwork team is assembled from two types of people: those who are likely to be reading this book, and those who wouldn’t even have imagined a book like this existed.” This book is written with that latter group in mind. It is intended to be an approachable introduction that is heavy on practical application.