Interviews (Digital.gov Human-Centered Design Guide)
Practitioner guidance on running user-research interviews, part of Digital.gov’s human-centered design guide series. No publish date is shown on the page; year above reflects the access date, not a stated publication year.
License: Public domain — U.S. federal government work (17 U.S.C. § 105)
Key points
- Interviews need at least two people on the team: an interviewer and a dedicated notetaker.
- Prepare a research guide of key topics to cover rather than a fixed question script — run the interview as a guided conversation, not a formal Q&A.
- Keep an “elevator pitch” ready in case a participant asks what the project is about.
- The 5 Whys technique: repeatedly asking “why” about a vague or abstract word/phrase the participant used, to draw out the concrete detail behind it.
- Mirror the participant’s own words back to them in question form, rather than leading with your own paraphrase of what you think they mean — this avoids cueing them toward the answer you expect.
- Internal interviewer bias is treated as unavoidable; the guidance frames the fix as awareness and acknowledgment of it, not elimination.