Interviews

Interviews are a fundamental research method for direct contact with users or stakeholders, to collect the personal accounts of their experiences, attitudes, opinions and perceptions.

User Interviews

A user interview is a type of qualitative, ethnographic research technique. The “user” is an individual who uses the product or service or interacts with the system that you wish to study, and helps you to understand their goals, behaviours, needs, and motivations.

A user interview is not good at predicting future behaviour, but rather looks at existing mental models, which can be very insightful. It’s a good idea to conduct user research in combination with other research techniques, such as quantitative studies.

Stakeholder Interviews

A stakeholder interview is a type of qualitative, primary research. A “stakeholder” is an individual who has deep knowledge about the challenge or aspect of challenge you are working towards solving. This individual is able to give great depth of information given their particular perspective in a short period of time. The information or connections they share can lead you to further research material or potential partners and champions.

You can conduct an interview in 30 to 60 minutes, or up to 90 minutes for an in-depth interview. This is ideally done in-person (so you can be attuned to your interviewees’ non-verbal communication), but can also be conducted via phone, or web audio/video. The general questioning technique is semi-structured and open-ended. This means you have a good sense of the topics you want to ask about, but don’t stick to a rigid line of questioning, to allow for unanticipated but insightful responses and better flow.

Examples and Resources

Example of the start of a user/expert interview.

Conducting an Interview

Instructions: How to conduct an interview

The following is a general guide to follow - please see the resource links below for more information. 1) Identify issue areas It takes a lot of preparation to run a successful research process. Know your research goals, and what you aim to achieve. It’s important to identify issue areas to focus on in your questioning (choose 5-7 issue areas to find out more about through your interviews).

2) Choose interviewees There are many ways to choose interviewees – choose the method that best meets your goals. You may need to go directly to the spaces where the user spends time to find them. Using a snowballing technique can also be helpful (choosing interviewees through personal referrals from contacts or previous interviewees). Ensure you are reaching a good cross-section of your user group, accounting for gender, age, socio-economic status, and so on.

3) Create an interview guide Create an interview guide for the person/ user or stakeholder group you are interviewing. See the next tab for tips on creating an interview guide.

4) Conduct the interview Open the interview with an explanation of who you are, what your project is, and how you anticipate the information you gather will be used. Ensure you have the interviewee’s consent to record the interview, or to use the interview material in any way (such as for quotes). Ask them if they want their anonymity protected, and reassure them that they will have a chance to vet the information before anything is published. It is helpful to start with a question that allows the interviewee to speak broadly about the topic at hand. Here, you can pick up on cues that will highlight their particular perspective (such as through descriptors they are using). Then, probe each of the issue areas you would like to understand better. Don’t ‘force’ your questions, but let them emerge naturally in the flow of the interview. 5) Debrief and analysis Make sure you leave enough time in between interviews to debrief the previous interview, refine your questions and techniques for the next interview, and to follow-up on new interviewee leads. It’s also very useful to review your interview right after conducting it, so you can fill in your notes, transcribe the interview or write down high-level insights.

6) Synthesis To analyze the results, collect all the concepts that emerge from your interviews in one place. One way of doing this is by writing the concepts on sticky notes and clustering them into meaningful patterns. Note which user group each idea comes from. Some clear themes will emerge. This is an oversimplified description of coding and analysis, but it will help you get started to understanding the user perspective. Refer to the sensemaking tab below for more information on how to make sense of the information you gather in interviews.

Sensemaking

Interview Guide

The following information has been contributed from Ben Weinlick and Aleeya Velji as Think Jar Collective in the Social Innovation Field Guide found here:

Social Innovation Lab Field GuideThink Jar Collective

Instructions: Building an interview guide

1) Identify objectives for interviews What do we wish/need to gain from the interview? What kind of insights are we looking for? How do we build trust with people?

2) Come up with questions There are many ways to build questions. You can try dividing questions into two groups: easy vs. deep. Easy questions help us make people feel comfortable and open up. Deep questions give us insight into people’s hopes, ambitions, fears etc. Examples of easy vs. deep questions: Easy: What did you and your family do over the weekend? Deep: Draw your dream grocery aisle. What would be on the shelves and in the coolers?

Start with the easy questions and move to deep questions as trust is built. What kinds of questions do we want to ask? Should we have questions or just topics to guide the interview?

3) Think of some ice-breakers or conversation starters What are some ways in which we can build trust together? How can we be thoughtful of different groups of people? How can we make people feel comfortable?

4) Think about out-of-the box interview techniques - Give participants a camera and ask them to take pictures of things that are important to them in their environment and why. - Ask people to build a time line of their experiences, what was important to them, what they struggled with, etc. - Give people a deck of cards with words on them and ask them to sort the words in order of importance. - What are some other techniques that can give us insights?

Techniques

When you’re conducting an interview, it's helpful to practice a few key techniques.

DOOR OPENERS: help you to open the door for more rich information

• An invitation to talk and continue talking (open questions, minimal encourages)

• Silence (space to decide if/what to talk about) – let the silence be

• Attending (non-verbal communication)

DOOR CLOSERS: close the interviewee off from giving you rich information

• Sending a solution (you tell them what should be done)

• Cutting off a thought, finishing their sentence

GENERAL TIPS

• It’s not an ordinary conversation, it’s an interview, so be careful not to use your casual conversation habits (such as agreeableness, for example).

• Listen actively, and try to avoid influencing their words or making presumptions. Rather, aim to probe initial responses by asking open-ended follow-up questions such as “why?”, “how do you mean?”, or “can you give me an example?”. Summarizing what you’ve heard and checking your understanding with the interviewee is another active listening technique.

• Be ready to override what you think you know: the interviewee is the expert.

• Know that each interview is unique, bringing new ideas to light.

• Jot down any questions you have as your interviewee is talking, so that you can ask them at an appropriate time during the rest of the interview.

• A good user interviewer is empathetic, and will gain a deeper understanding of the user experience throughout the interview.

Key Resources

Nesta. DIY Toolkit, Interview Guide. http://diytoolkit.org/tools/interview-guide-2/

Service Design Toolkit. Interview Template. http://www.servicedesigntoolkit.org/assets/templates/InterviewTemplate_%20EN.docx