Conduct Research

This resource provides some tips for selecting subjects that represent a variety of perspectives on an issue to understand it fully. 

“Extreme users” are those on the margins of a challenge or solution who can provide unique insights because of their special needs, perspectives, or actions. This resource explains the value of interviewing extreme users and how to seek them out.

This is a list of factors to keep in mind as you conduct interviews. 

This is an interview technique designed to get to the root cause of behaviors. 

This one-pager explains what the arc of an interview should look like and some guidelines for engaging with an interviewee to truly understand their perspective.

This one-pager provides a framework for generating interview questions that elicit facts, objectives, emotions, and ideas from your interviewees. 

This resource provides guidance on how to curate groups for group interviews and facilitate the experience so it yields the information that your project needs.

A photojournal is a way for users to provide a firsthand account of their experience with the challenge you’re researching through pictures or videos.
 

Just what they sound like, conversation starters are meant to start conversations in a fun, low-stakes way. They can generate reactions, opinions, and openings for more direct lines of questioning.  
 

Provide people with supplies and ask them to make a collage in response to a prompt about your research topic. This method provides a way for people of all ages to share their thoughts. 
 

A card sort is a quick and easy way to have people express their priorities and preferences. It involves creating multiple cards with pictures and/or words on each and having the participants sort them based on specific prompts. The results are often surprising.

A guided tour is a method to “reveal not just the physical details of the person’s life, but the routines and habits that animate it.” It involves asking someone to provide a verbal description of their physical environment (classroom, office, school building, etc.) as they take you through it or to shadow someone as they go through their daily activities in their natural context. 

Ask interview subjects to draw a concept, graph, journey, or timeline to communicate visually. 

A resource flow is a simple chart of how financial and material assets flow through a system.

A diary study asks participants to keep a diary over a period of time to record different aspects of a service or experience.

Getting out of the office and into the world of the people that you’re trying to understand is a central concept of human-centered design. Site visits get you to the place where policies turn into practices to see what’s working and what’s not.
 

Good observation requires more than simply watching and taking notes. This section of a longer document provides some guidance on what to look for when observing stakeholders and how to capture observations using photos, audio, video, and sketches. 
 

The Shadow a Student Challenge, a collaborative effort of various education organizations, describes this method as “seeing school through your student’s eyes, identifying meaningful opportunities to improve the school experience for your students, and then taking action to create change at your school site.”
 

Riding the bus with students is a specific context in which to observe students that bridges their home environment and school world. This resource provides some thoughts on why and how to ride the bus with students. 
 

This is an interesting method that enlists the people you’re designing a policy for as fellow researchers, such as having a teacher interview fellow teachers. 

This is a simple hierarchy of questions to guide observational note-taking, starting with concrete observations and ending with educated interpretation.