20151219 user interviews

Toward Personas2015.12.19

Product Service System Design Studio 2015-2016 | Tongji UniversityAndrea Carlon, Francesco Petronelli

User Interviews

Index

User Interviews

1. Preparing for a round of Interviews

1.1 Documenting the Interviews1.2 Creating Interview Goals1.3 Generating Discussion Guide1.4 Create Screener

2. Conducting an Interview

2.1 Personnel / Roles2.2 Other Pre-Requirements2.3 Pilot2.4 During the Interview

Product Service System Design Studio 2015-2016 | Tongji UniversityUser Interviews | 2015.12.19

3 Reviewing the Interview

3.1 Interview Debrief3.2 Interview Summary3.3 Summary of all Interviews3.4 Executive Summary

Introduction

Things to consider about interviews

• Interviews are time-consuming.• Ideally, you would interview about 10 people within a given demographic

- After 7 or 8 interviews, you will probably begin seeing recurring patterns or repeated information.

• The narrower the demographic you choose from, the more confident you can be that the people you interview will represent this demographic. - As more demographics or markets are involved, the number of people you need to interview to be accurate grows exponentially - Example of a narrow demographic: TEACHERS, 1+ years on italki, 200+ sessions, teaching ONLY English, from the USA, living in the USA or Canada, age 26-35.

• Depending on the specific goals of each interview, the steps required to faithfully collect


Preparing for interviews

1.1 Documenting the Interviews1.2 Creating Interview Goals1.3 Generating Discussion Guide1.4 Create Screener


1

Documenting the Interviews1.1


Think ahead about how to document the interviews and save the information. This will make it easier later on.

Documents to create: 1. Goals document 2. Discussion Guide 3. Screener 4. Interview Notes (including audio, photo, video) 5. Sumup Notes 6. Executive Summary / Presentation 7. Any other relevant documents, surveys, etc

Creating Interview Goals1.2


This document is for the interview team to agree on and prioritize what is important to understand.

This will be the main guide later on in the process to prioritize what to ask.

Generating Discussion Guide

long the interview will take. Prioritize topics so that if there is time pressure, you know what to ask about and what to cut.

• Double-check: compare the Discussion Guide with the original Interview Goals document to make sure all the goal information is being asked about in the Discussion Guide.

• Format and print the discussion guide so the person leading the interview can see and organize the questions conveniently.

ensures that if you are in a time crunch, you will have asked the most important things first.

• Within the “macro topics”, identify the subtopics. When you are doing the interview, you should not move on from one macro topic until you have asked all the questions within it. The purpose of this is to provide an orderly sequence so you don’t forget anything.

• For each Macro Topic and major topic within the macro topic, estimate how much time should be allocated. Write this down. Add up the times to see how

The discussion guide is what you will use to get the “goals” out of the interviewee.

The purpose is to make sure that:

• You’re covering all the information you want to get.

• You’re forming the questions in a way that will get you the information you really want.

• Identify the major topics you want to learn about. These are the “Macro Topics”.

• Prioritize the Macro Topics in the order you want to ask about them. This

1.3


1.4


Screener

How will you choose your interviewees to make sure the responses are comparable?

Choose a very coherent group of users that is rapresentative of the demographic you want to design for.

Conducting an interview

2.1 Personnel / Roles2.2 Other Pre-Requirements2.3 Pilot2.4 During the Interview


2

Personnel / Roles2.1


InterviewerResponsibilities: run the interview, ask the questions, maintain the “flow” of the interview.

Note-takerResponsibilities: Support interviewer, help make sure all questions are covered, time-stamp notes for reference, record and upload notes to shared digital medium.

OthersIf helpful, additional people might join the process to help with specific roles such as: video record the interview, interpret to non-native observers, additional note taking, etc...

Pre-Requirements2.2


An interview cannot start without having these things sorted out first

Recording equipment: Could be at minimum an audio recorder, but it is always better to record the interviewee on video in order to capture the emotions on his face during the interview. For remote interview (over the internet) this could be achieved by recording the screen during a video call.

Discussion GuidePrinted list of Questions / note-taking guide.

Background information on intervieweeRetrieved during the screener. Used as conversation starter and to probe the user interests.

Pilot Interview2.3


A Pilot session is a complete test of the entire interview process with a person.

This is very important in order to:• test all the practical procedures, such as the recording equipment• test the discussion guide itself. Does it have a good flow? Is it too long?

During the Interview2.4


Once you get on-site, you’ll find these different stages:

1. Crossing the threshold - welcoming the interviewee or be welcomed 2. Restating objectives - informing the interviewee about what’s gonna happen3. Kick-off question - starting the real interview4. Accept the awkwardness - it takes time to people to get confortable5. The tipping point - from short answers to stories6. Reflection and projection - intimate and personal thoughts7. The soft close - a graceful bye

From “Interviewing Users. How to Uncover Compelling Insights.” By Steve Portigal

Reviewing the Interview

3.1 Interview Debrief3.2 Interview Summary3.3 Summary of all Interviews3.4 Executive Summary


3

Reviewing the Interview3


Do this as soon as possible after the interview so you don’t forget important things. Record or talk about your general impressions from the interview: What was expected? What was surprising? What was new?

Interview Debrief3.1


What to do:• Go through notes in chronological

order. When you see something important, put it on the correctly-colored post-it and stick it to the board.

• This is a collaborative effort, but one person should lead the effort by standing at the board, reading post-it notes out loud and sticking them on. Everyone should hear about all the post-its on the board.

• If a person wants to go ahead and write more on their own, leave the notes on the table until they can be announced and stuck to the bard

• If you’re not sure about some information, check the time stamp in the notes and go back to the recording to verify.

• If you notice repetition or patterns emerging, begin clumping similar notes near each other.

What you need:• Get a board and colored post-its.

Different colored post-its should correspond to different “Macro Topics” from the discussion guide.

• Get all notes from interview, preferably shared and organized in Google Drive

• Have recording from interview available

PURPOSE: The purpose is to combine interview notes and making important details into post-its.

DO NOT try to summarize or explain any trends at this point. The most accurate way is to copy information as directly as possible from the interview notes onto a post-it note. If you are speculating about something, you may generate an extra post-it to represent this.

Interview Debrief 3.1


Interview Summary (Sum-up)3.2


the notes in the group.• Open up a Document (Google Doc is

execellent for this activity) and record the Macro-Topic and subtopics, write important things about subtopics into bullet points.

• Go through each of the color groups / Macro-Topics this way.

• If you notice emerging patterns or topics that you didn’t expect or that don’t seem to be really captured in the present Macro-Topics, make a note of this. If necessary, you can generate a new topic to capture it in the Document.

You’re going to print out the document and compare it to the others next.

What to do:• Go back to the board with colored post-

its.• This is a collaborative effort, but

one person should lead the effort by standing at the board, reading post-it notes out loud so everyone is on the same page, starting with first one macro topic (color of post-it), grouping the notes together based on consensus, and finishing that before proceeding to the next.

• Start with one Macro-Topic (color of post-its) and read everything in that category to review

• Everyone together, begin thinking of how to organize that Macro-Topic into subtopics, and group those notes near each other

• How do you know when you have a group? Think of a title that describes all

PURPOSE: The purpose is to condense post-its from the debrief into a document that describes this interview in a more concise and structured way. This is about making a lot of post-its into concise bullet points.

DO try to be as concise as possible, for example, if several post-its can be summarized into a single thought, then do this. But, make sure you are not losing information.Keep to simple, objective statements that are based on the interview notes and not on your own thoughts about them. If you have your own thoughts (which is good) write an additional post it and set it aside or clearly label it as a thought and not a fact from the interview.

Interview Summary3.2


Summary of all Interviews (Group Sum-up)3.3


down on the new document.• Make sure that the statement in the

new document is objective and based on the interview information.

• IF you haven’t already, you might begin automatically synthesizing information, drawing conclusions, and noticing problems. These are important! Make note of these, though keep them in a separate category from the summarized information.

• Move topic-by-topic until you are done comparing the summaries.

• At the end, you should have a new document that states everything worth saying about the compared summaries and interviews as a whole.

• The new document should also include any interesting patterns, trends, problems, or opportunities that you noticed earlier, but that didn’t fit in an existing category.

What to do:• This is a collaborative effort. It’s not

necessary for one person to lead, but make sure that whoever is at the board is reading out loud so everyone can keep up.

• Depending on how many interviews you are managing, you can try to do them all at once or do comparisons two-by-two until you notice patterns of similarities or differences emerging.

• Beginning with one sumup document, read through the items in the first Macro-Topic.

• Go in order to make sure you don’t miss anything. When you notice something that is notably the same or different compared to another Sumup, say this and show it by highlighting the place in both (or in all) documents where this similarity can be seen.

• Decide what is worth saying about that similarity (or difference) and write that

PURPOSE: The goal of summarizing all interviews is to create an executive summary and presentation.

You will need:• Colored pens, markers, tiny post-its,

anything that will help you mark similarities or differences across documents.

• Print-outs of all interview summaries.• A place to spread out the interview

summaries.• A new board or document to write

down the overall conclusions from the comparisons of summaries.

Executive Summary3.4


What to do:• Go back over the Group Sumup, and

highlight the things that you think are most notable. Compare thoughts with others and write down in a few concise bullet points.

• Probably a good idea to check final Executive summary with someone else, too, and see whether they are interested by it or whether it causes them to immediately wonder about some followup questions.

• The final document is between half page and one page

PURPOSE: Now, after spending so much time with this information, it’s time to cut it down. This is the elevator pitch of the document

If you had two powerpoint slides or perhaps 30 seconds of someone’s time, what is the most important, actionable stuff to tell them about this summary?

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Contacts

Product Service System Design Studio 2015-2016 | Tongji UniversityAndrea Carlon, Francesco Petronelli

Developing goals and

discussion guide.


Today’s Excercise

Tasks• Brainstorm and decide what are the goals of the interviews.

What is necessary vs. what is nice to know. (20 minutes)

• Braindump of all the questions to add in the discussion guide. Post on the board a post-it for each question. (20 minutes)

• Restructuring of the questions under few macro-topics (20 minutes)

• Writing the questions on a structured document, estimate of the time, cleanup according to the goals.

• Presentation to the class of the discussion guide (10 minutes each)