5 Questions you should ask in your User Interviews

When it comes to running an effective User Interview, a little planning can go a long way. We’ve outlined the questions below to help kickstart your planning, and get the most out of your session on Fable. Whether you’re a seasoned researcher, or not, we hope these questions leave you excited about engaging assistive technology users in your research practice.

1. What do you typically use this assistive technology for? 

The idea that testers have a “primary” assistive technology (AT) is a bit of a myth. People will often choose the tool that best first their need for a specific situation and AT is no different. For many of our testers, they may be using a combination of different tools for different types of tasks in their day to day lives. Take for example a screen reader user choosing NVDA when dealing with email or spreadsheets but VoiceOver for internet shopping.  

When you start your session, it’s helpful to contextualize what the tester normally uses the chosen AT for compared to how they’ll be leveraging it for your set tasks. 

2. How does this compare to other similar experiences? 

For many researchers, we love to ask the question “What could we do to delight you?”. However, the challenge this poses for assistive technology users is that the question feels too far off in the horizon to reach. If they’re already interacting with a product that feels broken from an accessibility standard, ideating past “I want it to work” can be especially challenging.  

To look for improvements of your experience beyond just the elements you have created, you can ask testers to talk through other similar products they’ve used and why they felt like a good experience. This can help you spark ideation conversations for new features to explore while still having the conversation feel tangible to your tester. 

3. Did this take the amount of time you expected it to take? 

While timing is a pretty standard metric to gather in a usability test, for AT user interviews we believe it should take a back seat to task completion. That said, it can be valuable to understand if a task felt like it took the right amount of time. Our testers are all different in how they approach a product, thus some will want to spend a longer amount of time familiarizing themselves with a page or element before moving forward in a flow. With this, people have different thresholds of patience for tasks they only see themselves doing once versus tasks they would do frequently on a specific page.  

Take advantage of a question like this to learn more about your tester, so you can also better understand how they might differ from other testers using a similar assistive technology. Lastly,  if you’re looking for a quantitative metric for your session, consider leveraging our free tool, the Accessible Usability Scale (AUS) at the end of your sessions. 

4. How do you see yourself using this feature? 

Knowing if a user can complete a flow is one thing but understanding how that user prefers to engage a product is another. In your follow–up questions, it’s important to explore how the user sees themselves using your tested features, if at all. If you’ve tested something like a pickup in-store flow, why might this not be a service the user engages? Are there missing pieces in the digital to physical hand-off that pose additional challenges?  

While you’ll get an extremely personalized response to the user’s specific reality, a question like this ensures you understand the role your product plays in a person’s life. Investigating past the standard digital ecosystem is vital since user experience doesn’t end when a user closes their webpage.  

5. Did anything unexpected happen? 

When it comes to navigating products with assistive technology, consistency is vital, and this goes beyond even just your own website. Ensuring that elements and components behave in ways that a user has learned through interactions with other technology is the baseline for a usable experience.  

Asking a question around expectations after a task or at the end of a session provides you with a few opportunities: 

• You’ll know what parts of the experience are top–of–mind for your tester 
• You’ll be able to spark discussion for sessions where asking questions in situ wasn’t possible 
• You’ll learn from the tester themselves what they expect from an experience and be able to compare this with findings from your other sessions 

Go forth and interview!

We hope this has given you a few new ideas, as you plan your User Interview with Fable. With a plan in place and some good questions prepared, your interviews are bound to be fun and fruitful! Feel free to check out this article on planning your User Interview if you’re looking for some more tips and best practices.