Earlier today I had a conversation with Richi (a designer and one of my great friends from school) surrounding what we should be thinking about when conducting user research. To date I haven’t applied any formality to this process, or even thought deeply enough about it to consider it a process at all. We talked about what types of questions to include in an interview screening, what may qualify or disqualify someone from being appropriate for a study, how to frame research questions, how to communicate tasks for a user to execute. This was not exclusively in the context of River, but also in relation to the work he does and broader insights gleaned from that experience. One approach which I’d like to experiment with, is getting on a call with someone who has little context of River, and trying to understand the conceptions they develop about the platform, just by experiencing it. Having an understanding of these feelings and attitudes, what type of person tends to develop them, and what notions are commonly shared, seems at the least to be an interesting data point, and in an ideal scenario becomes an aid in identifying a more narrow target audience.