The best insights aren’t spoken – they’re discovered.

The problem

There is no doubt you should talk to customers and users as part of your customer discovery efforts. Interacting with them is critical to identify and validate needs, learn about pain points, understand solution benefits and much, much more.

Remote interviews became a staple of customer discovery and often relied on heavily. After all, they are quick, convenient, scalable and relatively cheap. In recent years they have become so accessible that it is tempting to use them exclusively.

Relying too heavily on remote calls gives you superficial insights. The real golden nuggets of deep insights? They are found on-site.

The hidden part of the story

Don’t get me wrong. Remote interviews are a great way to interact with customers and users and to obtain insights. A well-structured interview can go a pretty long way (a worthy topic for a separate post), but it still only tells part of the story.

Interviews give you what people say – but not what they do. The real story unfolds on-site. Here’s what you’re missing.

The messy real-world work environment

In remote interviews, people may opt to speak to you from their home or an isolated location. They will typically do this towards the edges of their workday or outside normal hours altogether. All for good reasons, but this means you are not seeing them in their natural work environment.

💡I came on-site after being told on a call “we have it set up for all radiologists”. Coming on-site revealed:

3 monitors. 2 sets of mouse and keyboard each connected to a separate computer
People struggled to find which mouse was which
Manually retyping identifiers since they couldn’t copy/paste

You’d never catch this in a remote interview.

What they don’t say speaks volumes

In interviews, people always tend to share filtered feedback. When you are conducting it remotely you cannot catch nonverbal cues and body language. You also miss the quick eye roll of the nurse passing by when the doctor was telling you the solution made everyone more efficient.

💡That other person in the room that suddenly yelled at their screen because they couldn’t find the record they were looking for? Pure gold!

Real-world usage and workflow

Without going on-site and observing people work in their natural environment, you won’t get to see the real way people use the systems. You will miss out on various workarounds and hacks people naturally resort to when gaps arise: that post it note, the excel sheet, that flowchart on the whiteboard.

💡Seeing the user scribble a patient number down so they could come back to it later can be that insight leading to an impactful time saving feature.

Emotional drivers

When people set up an interview at a convenient time they are usually at their best. When you visit on-site you get a glimpse of their emotional side in the real-world environment.

💡I was speaking to the head of emergency surgery when he got a call. He finished it with “unfortunately we don’t have an available OR. I don’t think he’s going to make it”. Beyond this impactful reminder to the industry I was serving, seeing the effect this had on the doctor in front of me was even more impactful.

Pain points they stopped noticing

In interviews people speak to their own perceptions. Going on-site offers opportunities to see inefficiencies and gaps that your interviewees don’t even notice. People won’t mention these in interviews: they are either so used to it that they don’t see it or simply have no idea there’s something you could do to fix it.

Additional people you didn’t intend to speak with

When going on-site, you will discover additional people involved in workflows that you did not plan to speak to or look to interview remotely. This insight alone can be priceless, and the inputs from these additional stakeholders can be very rich.

Collaboration patterns

Workflows often involve multiple people. In an interview you are speaking to one individual at a time. Going on-site offers a glimpse at various ways people interact as part of their work. That interruption, that phone call, the written note and who it was handed to are all amazing insights you would miss in an interview.

Get the full story – complement remote with on-site

Remote interviews are a great starting point, and you should do them routinely, but they are not enough.

Complement remote interviews with on-site visits. Don’t simply use these visits for interviews.

10 Tips for getting the most insights from your visit

Going on-site is an amazing opportunity for gleaning insights. Follow these tips to get the most out of them:

Plan to spend sufficient time if you are coming on-site - don’t pack your schedule!
Beyond conversations, ask permission to stay and observe how they work
Ask to observe more than one person if possible
Be respectful of people’s work, and make sure not to add unnecessary burden
Especially in a healthcare setting, always be mindful of patient privacy
Ask for permission when wanting to ask questions or interrupt someone. Tell them it’s ok to say no (you will usually get a yes)
Ask clarification questions and “why did you do that?” questions for deep insights
Ask someone to simply verbalize their thought process. This is golden if people are willing to do so
Pay attention to indicators of workflow gaps: post its, paper workarounds, verbal communication, etc
Try to observe the experience through multiple stakeholders (e.g., clinician and patient)

The best insights aren’t spoken – they are discovered

💡Ever had an insight that could only came from that on-site visit? Drop your best ‘aha moment’ in the comments!

Only doing remote interviews? you’re missing 80% of the story