Copy of Interviewing Freebie
1.- Defining your research questions
Gather your team and ask these questions prior allocating any effort in conducting interviews. By stating clear goals, the whole team will have a north star and it will be easy for everybody to distinguish the signal from the noise and make evidence-based decisions.
- What do you want to learn about? Users? Product? The organization?
- Do you want to explore new ideas and gather insights? (generative research) or validate hypotheses? (evaluative research).
- What are the riskiest assumptions the team is making?
- How can these assumptions be mitigated?
Now it is time to build your toolkit of questions to meet your research. You cannot ask the research questions directly to your participants, as you need to rephrase them so they feel more natural, and thus allowing them to answer them better.
- About sequence: Walk me through a typical day in your job.
- About quantity: How many emails do you read a day?
- Ask for specific examples: What was the last time you purchased something online?
- Ask about exceptions: Can you walk me through one time the system drove you crazy?
- Ask for the complete list: What are all the enterprise applications you get to use on a weekly basis?
- Ask about relationships: How do you collaborate with other team members?
- Ask about organizational structure: Who do the people in that department report to?
- Ask for clarification: You mentioned ‘this’ earlier, you’re talking about the content management system, right?