Preparing Interviews
- Identify who you want to interview, where, and when, and reach out to them to schedule as soon as possible. Each should take 30min-45min roughly.
- When thinking of people to interview, try to make your selection diverse as you can – they could vary in age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and so on – just make sure to choose people unlike yourself. If you found demographics in your market research, you can start there. Also, try to include a potential user who is usually excluded from the conversation, as well as someone who is what we call a “living expert” in your area of focus if possible.
- Develop a script or structured interview guide which includes your intro/warm up, the questions, and the conclusion/wrap-up. Use the same script/guide with each interviewee.
Conducting Interviews
- Intro: make them feel comfortable, tell them what the purpose of the conversation is, ask if you can record the audio, and gather demographic information.
- Body: ask neutral open-ended questions, be an active listener, ask follow-up and probing questions, and keep it natural.
- Example: Find out about your users first and get to know light relevant demographic information – day-to-day routine, location, career, relationships, hobbies, technology usage and habits. Discuss an umbrella topic related to your product. How did they discover your product? Move into how they use the product? Why they use it? How they feel about it? What other products do they use? Why they use them? How do they feel about them? And so on. Keep asking why?
- Conclusion: thank them and ask if they have any questions.
Synthesizing Interviews
- Analyze take-aways: identify themes, patterns, behaviors, user needs, mental models, feelings, pain points, opportunities, demographics.
- Cluster and prioritize your findings. Written reports work best.