01 / UNDERSTAND
What are expert interviews?
Expert interviews explore knowledge gained through specialist practice, study or responsibility in a defined field. They can explain terminology, technical dependencies and how decisions are made. Expertise is relevant to a question, rather than guaranteed by a senior title.
An expert may also be a stakeholder or service user. Clarify which perspective you are asking them to provide. Their account of what users need does not replace research with people who actually use the service.
Why use Expert Interviews?
Specialists can reveal constraints a team would otherwise discover late, or explain a change’s wider consequences. Interviews also expose disagreement within a field. The value comes from understanding knowledge in context, not collecting endorsements for a proposal.
When to use it
USE IT WHEN
The team is entering an unfamiliar domain and needs to frame better research questions.
A proposal depends on specialist processes that documents explain only partially.
Different practitioners disagree about a constraint or likely consequence.
When to choose another method
Use User Interviews to understand people’s own experience of the service.
Use Stakeholder Interviews to examine organisational interests, authority and definitions of success.
Use Competitive Analysis to inspect available offerings rather than relying on an expert’s recollection.
What you’ll need
Define the knowledge gap and read background material first. Recruit contrasting relevant experience. Explain the purpose, recording arrangements and attribution options. Prepare informed questions, an evidence log and time to explore unfamiliar concepts without pretending you understand them.
What the interviews need
Keep the elements that help answer your question and support a decision.
The specific uncertainty an expert could help you investigate.
The work, context and period behind the person’s knowledge.
Relevant differences in practice, role or institutional position.
Concrete incidents showing how a claim operates in practice.
The account, its source, limitations and possible corroboration.
Documents, observations or other interviews needed before acting.
02 / PUT IT INTO PRACTICE
How to conduct expert interviews
Keep evidence and assumptions distinct. Revisit your work when new information changes your understanding.
01
Identify the gap
Write what you need to understand and why it matters to a decision.
Ask what limits searching a library’s proposed digitised collection.
02
Select relevant expertise
Choose people with different knowledge, rather than repeating the same institutional view.
Include an archivist, a metadata practitioner and an accessibility specialist.
03
Prepare informed prompts
Read the basics and ask about processes, exceptions and recent experience.
Ask how missing catalogue information affects retrieval, rather than requesting a technology prediction.
04
Establish the boundary
Learn which cases the person handles and which lie outside their experience.
Separate work on printed documents from experience with handwritten records.
05
Explore concrete cases
Ask for a relevant example, the sequence of decisions and what complicated it.
Trace a failed search from the original document to the catalogue entry.
06
Probe uncertainty
Ask when the claim would not hold and who could offer another interpretation.
Check whether a constraint reflects the collection, the software or a local practice.
07
Check and synthesise
Compare important claims with other accounts and available material. Record unresolved differences.
Verify a proposed metadata requirement before making it a design dependency.
Example: searching a digitised library collection
Fictional scenario: a library wants visitors to find local history material online. An archivist explains that some records lack dates. A metadata practitioner describes a local convention for approximate periods. An accessibility specialist challenges the assumption that scanned page images alone provide usable access.
The team records these as separate claims with different boundaries. It asks for sample records and examines the local convention. The experts have helped identify retrieval and access questions, but have not shown how visitors search or what they understand.
The next research would involve actual visitors using representative material. The collection, accounts and resulting decisions in this example are invented.
03 / BELOW THE SURFACE
Below the surface: expertise can define which problems appear legitimate
An authoritative explanation may quietly establish the boundaries of the design brief.
BOUNDARY
Which experience supports this claim?
Locate the relevant cases.
EXCEPTION
When would the explanation fail?
Ask about limits and alternatives.
AUTHORITY
Does this describe a limit or choose a response?
Separate knowledge from preference.
A specialist may describe incomplete records as an unavoidable property of an archive. That explains a constraint, but it does not settle how the service should help a visitor handle uncertainty. Separate a constraint from a preferred response.
For each consequential claim, ask whether it concerns a technical limit, a local practice or a judgement about what should matter. These distinctions are an editorial decision aid for this guide, not a universal classification of expert knowledge.
The interviewer’s fluency also changes the conversation. Too little preparation can invite a lecture; performing expertise can discourage clarification. Make room for explanation without surrendering judgement. Record the terms you do not understand and ask for their consequences in a concrete case. A credible account still needs a clear scope.
Expert Interviews companion worksheet
These two original Design Iceberg companion sheets provide an expert interview planner and a claim review. Page one defines the knowledge gap, expertise mix, boundaries and prompts. Page two records concrete claims, supporting material, uncertainty and next checks. They are practical worksheets, not official or validated expert interview instruments.
Practical tips
Ask for cases that reveal how specialist knowledge is applied.
Request relevant documents when a claim can be checked.
Keep disagreements visible instead of blending them into consensus.
Common mistakes
Recruiting only prestigious people with the same institutional perspective.
Treating an expert’s account as evidence of service users’ needs.
Promoting an unverified opinion into a fixed design requirement.
What you’ll get
A clearer account of specialist constraints and uncertainty. Use it to focus further investigation, with consequential claims checked and questions about people’s lived experience taken into user research.