Thin-slicing user interviews

"One of the core ideas in Malcolm Gladwell's new book Blink is thin-slicing, our ability to make accurate judgements about people or events in a very short time frame.

Early in the book Gladwell describes an experiment where strangers made surprisingly accurate assessments of students' personalities based only on looking at their dorm rooms for 15 minutes. On three of five measures used in the experiment--conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to new experiences--the strangers made better assessments than the students' friends.

This got me thinking about my appoach to user interviews, which normally involves a getting-to-know-you interview to understand how a person thinks about a problem, application, product or whatever."