deathbearbrown
commented
8 years ago Tool: Interviewing
Description: Find real users of your project and interview them. You want to ask them about what they do, what their needs are, their frustrations, what they like to do for fun, in addition to getting pointed feedback about how they might feel about the thing you are creating. You're going to use the information gathered from these interviews to create unbiased personas.
Why use or do it: Interviewing is how you get data to later create personas. It also helps you collect requirements and challenge your own biases about what your users need.
Who’s involved: Find a few key types of users who will be interacting with your project. For example: These can be users of a web application, admin level maintainers of the application, and developer level maintainers.
When to use it:
Interviewing is helpful before every milestone in your project. It's good for collecting requirements as well as checking to see if the implementation is working.
Time commitment: 15 - 20 mins (note: this could go much longer, so be conscious of the clock)
Supplies:
- Note paper for participants
- Writing instruments
- Persona worksheet template
Set Up:
If you are in the same room as participants:
- Dedicate a room for the activity
- Have a set up where participants are sitting directly across from one another at a table in stations
- Place paper and pens at the desks
- Invite particpants to the room
If you are remote:
- Have a handful of appear.in rooms setup in advance (one per stakeholder)
- Have a slack channel open to update participants about timing
Activity
- Explain the activity - this activity is in inspired by the concept of speed dating, however instead of potential love interests, you will be interview potential stakeholders. For remote participation, it might be easiest here to have the activity commence in a single appear.in room.
- Spread the love - Ask potential interviewees to spread themselves around the room (s) at stations. For the topic of this exercise, we will be interviewing stakeholders for the People App, so you should try to find at least one Account Manager. (As a facilitator, try to scope out if you have this person available to you, if not make arrangements to have a staff member join your team remotely.)
- Check your assumptions - (Note: you will have your own assumptions about how the app should work going in, remember those and see if they've changed after talking to users) ask if there are any other potential user types - staff will most likely identify Staff who are not account managers, who just want to know what other staff interests and skills are.
- Think through your questions - what do you want to know? Basically I want to come away knowing what problem the tool will need to solve - and who that is a problem for.
- Let the speed geeking commence You play referee and start a clock that goes for 4 or 5 min. Then everyone rotates and you do it again. This works best if interviewers go out in pairs with one person acting as the interogator and the other as the documenter. In 15 minutes each participants will have seen 3 stakeholders and the stakeholders will have chatted 3 times.
- Post interview discovery Discussion: Did you find out anything that went against your original assumptions? Did you find out anything surprising?
Some people might find it helpful to use the worksheet here - as a note taking guide:
Examples:
Learn More: Learn more about how to talk to and interview potential stakeholders: Read Talking to Humans by Giff Constable (the PDF is free!)
//todo the interviews wiki guide
I'm picking out the ones in the toolkit list that I know.