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."