Slightly frustrated to read this, because this is user research 101! It's really impressive when someone independently discovers practices from an outside discipline, just by observation and inference. However, somebody could have saved this poor guy a lot of frustration by not forcing him to develop a product design methodology from first principles.
They were an intern, but I think it leads to a bigger point I was thinking about as I was reading this:
In every org I’ve been in, we’ve had interns do these kinds of things: build big intrusive things that suck and no one uses. The problem obviously isn’t the interns. It’s the projects we give them, which are meant to be basically “throw-awayable”, and the complete lack of actual guidance and oversight.
Why are tech companies so bad at actually mentoring interns? They _should_ have had someone teaching them about user experience 101, and they completely let them flounder. How are we supposed to continue to grow and evolve as an industry if we make make every neue klasse start from scratch?
For this specific case (product discovery interviews) take a look at Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal, and Validating Product Ideas by Tomer Sharon.
I found "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug to be a helpful guide. As an engineer who was shy to approach product design, I felt the language really helped demystify things.
