What do you think?
Inviting Depth: How to Conduct Richer, More Revealing Research Interviews
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 17, 2026
This book belongs on any designer or researcher’s shelf. The techniques here are foundational and prepare you to go into the field with thoughtfulness of how you orchestrate your approach to honor your research participants.
March 24, 2026
The word “qualitative” is coming up in a lot of conversations in the business world. There’s excitement about the idea of conducting qualitative research “at scale”, even as experienced hands in qualitative market research are cautioning people to think critically about such ideas.
Among the reasons for the chatter is a publicity stunt by Anthropic, the company that created the generative AI chatbot Claude. Anthropic has released the results of what it claimed was the largest qualitative research project ever, performed by a modified version of Claude.
As usual, the hype didn’t match reality. Anthropic’s chatbot did not conduct interviews. It operated an online survey. The research model was not qualitative. It was a quantitative analysis of linguistic data.
A Handbook For Exploring Qualia
If you want to understand what genuine qualitative research looks like, a new book called Inviting Depth: How To Conduct Richer, More Revealing Research Interviews is a great place to start. The book, by Brandon Berry and Tom Williams of Point Forward, focuses on the foundations of effective interviewing, and that’s key. Not all qualitative research involves interviewing in the sense of a researcher asking questions of participants, but all qualitative research takes on the perspective of interviewing, in its philosophical sense.
Consider the graphic on the front cover of Inviting Depth. It’s a metaphorical representation of what an interview is all about. Two circles come together, not completely, but with the inner core of each touching the outer edge of the other. In this way, an interview facilitates an inter-view, which I what happens when two people can share some aspects of how they see reality.
An interview is much more than a data-gathering exercise. Qualitative research is all about reaching qualia — bits of subjective conscious experience. It goes beyond external actions and communications. Qualitative research cannot be done by something that is devoid of qualia.
Qualitative research aims for empathy. A computer gathers information but has no knowledge, no understanding, no emotions or no conscious experience, and so can never get anywhere close to empathy.
A Guide For Interviews Of Trust
Even for human beings, it is no easy task to obtain empathy. The purpose of Inviting Depth is to provide practical methods for researchers to gain the trust that’s required for people to feel comfortable sharing aspects of their inner experience.
Fundamentally, the method described by Berry and Williams is about investment in human-to-human connection. “The more you invest in the participant experience, the more influential and enduring your research becomes,” they write.
Investment in an interview requires patience. An effective interviewer doesn’t rush to get to answers, but takes the time required to create the conversational context needed to reach heartfelt, vulnerable revelations. This approach to interviewing transcends the direct query-and-response focus on questions, seeking instead to create the conditions under which research participants are willing to reveal insights that go beyond what any single question could provoke. The authors explain:
“The richness of someone’s life, the very thing we hope to learn about, can’t be forced or extracted. It emerges only when participants choose to share, and that happens when the conditions feel right. Creating those conditions is like extending an invitation: offering time, space, and genuine care so people are comfortable bringing their full selves into the conversation.”
Berry and Williams identify specific opportunities for investment throughout the qualitative research process. They begin even before the interview begins, in the design of a study and in the initial conversations that recruit people to become research participants. They explore a variety of interviewing techniques, but also detail opportunities for post-interview follow-through that preserve the potential for additional conversations in the future.
While AI firms are encouraging researchers to retreat from human-to-human interaction, Berry and Williams call for a maintenance of presence. Instead of chasing after the latest technological trends, they advise that, “The path forward is to more deliberately embrace what makes us distinctly human.”
Inviting Depth is an excellent resource for young professionals who are just learning to manage the qualitative research process. Even more importantly, this book is a reminder for experienced researchers of what makes qualitative research uniquely valuable, and what will be lost if it is cast aside in favor of automated imitations.
Among the reasons for the chatter is a publicity stunt by Anthropic, the company that created the generative AI chatbot Claude. Anthropic has released the results of what it claimed was the largest qualitative research project ever, performed by a modified version of Claude.
As usual, the hype didn’t match reality. Anthropic’s chatbot did not conduct interviews. It operated an online survey. The research model was not qualitative. It was a quantitative analysis of linguistic data.
A Handbook For Exploring Qualia
If you want to understand what genuine qualitative research looks like, a new book called Inviting Depth: How To Conduct Richer, More Revealing Research Interviews is a great place to start. The book, by Brandon Berry and Tom Williams of Point Forward, focuses on the foundations of effective interviewing, and that’s key. Not all qualitative research involves interviewing in the sense of a researcher asking questions of participants, but all qualitative research takes on the perspective of interviewing, in its philosophical sense.
Consider the graphic on the front cover of Inviting Depth. It’s a metaphorical representation of what an interview is all about. Two circles come together, not completely, but with the inner core of each touching the outer edge of the other. In this way, an interview facilitates an inter-view, which I what happens when two people can share some aspects of how they see reality.
An interview is much more than a data-gathering exercise. Qualitative research is all about reaching qualia — bits of subjective conscious experience. It goes beyond external actions and communications. Qualitative research cannot be done by something that is devoid of qualia.
Qualitative research aims for empathy. A computer gathers information but has no knowledge, no understanding, no emotions or no conscious experience, and so can never get anywhere close to empathy.
A Guide For Interviews Of Trust
Even for human beings, it is no easy task to obtain empathy. The purpose of Inviting Depth is to provide practical methods for researchers to gain the trust that’s required for people to feel comfortable sharing aspects of their inner experience.
Fundamentally, the method described by Berry and Williams is about investment in human-to-human connection. “The more you invest in the participant experience, the more influential and enduring your research becomes,” they write.
Investment in an interview requires patience. An effective interviewer doesn’t rush to get to answers, but takes the time required to create the conversational context needed to reach heartfelt, vulnerable revelations. This approach to interviewing transcends the direct query-and-response focus on questions, seeking instead to create the conditions under which research participants are willing to reveal insights that go beyond what any single question could provoke. The authors explain:
“The richness of someone’s life, the very thing we hope to learn about, can’t be forced or extracted. It emerges only when participants choose to share, and that happens when the conditions feel right. Creating those conditions is like extending an invitation: offering time, space, and genuine care so people are comfortable bringing their full selves into the conversation.”
Berry and Williams identify specific opportunities for investment throughout the qualitative research process. They begin even before the interview begins, in the design of a study and in the initial conversations that recruit people to become research participants. They explore a variety of interviewing techniques, but also detail opportunities for post-interview follow-through that preserve the potential for additional conversations in the future.
While AI firms are encouraging researchers to retreat from human-to-human interaction, Berry and Williams call for a maintenance of presence. Instead of chasing after the latest technological trends, they advise that, “The path forward is to more deliberately embrace what makes us distinctly human.”
Inviting Depth is an excellent resource for young professionals who are just learning to manage the qualitative research process. Even more importantly, this book is a reminder for experienced researchers of what makes qualitative research uniquely valuable, and what will be lost if it is cast aside in favor of automated imitations.
April 10, 2026
This book will teach you the key to high-hit-rate innovation: How to conduct individual, in-depth, research interviews to discover previously unknown needs and opportunities. Get some new territory that your company can own. I'm a 30-year veteran of product development in Silicon Valley. This book would have helped me avoid executing a lot of bad ideas really well.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews