Reading Below the Surface
What participants say is only half the data. How they say it: the pauses, the pitch shifts, the demonstrations, often tells you more about problem severity than the words themselves.
Emotional Valence as a Severity Signal
When a participant describes a workaround, track their emotional state:
- Frustration: "It's so annoying, I have to..." (high severity, user wants relief)
- Resignation: "I guess it's not ideal, but it's fine" (medium severity, might not be enough to drive adoption)
- Pride: "I built this whole system myself" (high engagement, but the bar to switch is higher)
- Indifference: flat affect, minimal detail (low severity, not worth solving)
The Power of Demonstrations
The best interview moments aren't answers, they're walkthroughs. When a participant says "let me show you" and pulls up a spreadsheet, opens 17 tabs, and explains the conditional formatting they invented to track compliance training, you're getting concrete, undeniable evidence.
No verbal description can match the information density of a demonstration. It reveals the actual complexity of the workaround, the specific pain points, and the requirements any solution must meet.
What demonstrations reveal that answers don't
Recording: Yes, With Consent
Record every interview (with explicit, named consent). A note-taker capturing only written transcripts loses:
- Emotional tone
- Pauses and emphasis
- Physical demonstrations
- The exact words that will become evidence during synthesis
The consent conversation should name specific uses: "We record so our team can review the conversation later, we don't share recordings beyond our research team, and we'll delete them after the project."