Interviews are one of the most common forms of conversational research, and they are fundamentally an act of learning how to see the world from others’ perspectives. You can think about every other research method as some sort of variant on a conversation, so learning how to do this well gives you the building blocks for everything else.

Interviews are deceptively difficult, because you have to do a bunch of things all at the same time:

• manage your own energy and attention
• manage your participant’s energy and attention
• develop and maintain rapport with the participant
• set and reinforce expectations
• guide the conversation
• ask probing questions and follow ups when appropriate
• take notes

In addition to the difficulty, what else do people not like about interviews?

• Humans can be bad self narrators. Yes, we have terrible memories and can be misguided. You want to think about how to balance getting the information you need in an interview with reducing the cognitive burden on the interviewee. This is not a police investigation that they have to sit through — think about their experience.
• What people say they’ll do and what they’ll actually do can be radically different. Again, yes! This is one of the reasons that whenever you ask someone to state a preference, you want to ask why. What they choose is far less valuable than understanding how that choice is being made. You are having a conversation to understand nuance. If you wanted to just quantify responses, you could do a survey.
• They can be awkward, feel confrontational, not go well in other ways, etc. Yes for the third time. Interviewing is a skill, and like most skills it needs to be practiced. You’re talking to another human, so you have all of the joys and challenges of human interaction at play. This is why it’s important to set expectations, develop trust and rapport, and be focused on your goals.

With all that in mind, here are some things to focus on as you’re preparing for and conducting interviews. 👇

Tips and Tricks

Before the Call

1. Do your homework!
   1. People do not exist to give you feedback. They are giving you their time and you should be respectful of it.
   2. You should have a clear reason for each person you want to talk to AND you should tell them why they are important to you early on. It gives them power in the conversation and reduces their fears about having “wrong answers.”
   3. Do not ask people questions that you can easily answer on your own UNLESS they are anchors for further conversation (i.e. Don’t ask “How many messages did you send this week?” if you can see that number in a database. If you want to talk about sending messages, you could ask something like “How many messages do you feel like you sent this week compared to prior weeks?”)
   4. Avoid asking questions that are cognitively taxing (“How many messages did you send in Slack last week?”)
2. Have a plan!
   1. The first thing to do is outline ~3 standard objectives you want to get out of every conversation. These will stay consistent regardless of who you speak to, but can evolve and sharpen as you learn more over time.
   2. Create a loose flow for the conversation, including how much time you want to spend. A good rule of thumb is 5-10 minutes for intro (hello’s, rapport building, and warm up), and 5 minutes at the end to give space for anything else they want to say. Now that you’ve cut 10-15 minutes out, the rest of the time is yours.
   3. Make 1B explicit, as in “Hi my name is [NAME] and I’m excited to talk to you today because [REASON]…”
   4. Create aspecific set of questions (~2 questions) per objective. You can (and should) always probe deeper with tailored follow up questions, but these standard questions you outline will ensure that you get the same insights out of each person and thus allows you to compare apples to apples across people! This will help you find patterns in your data over time (building a strong intuition for which problems and people to focus on)
   5. Be ready for chatty and quiet people. Sometimes you need to ask about the same thing in different ways. Other times you need to be prepared to shift the focus. Account for that in your discussion guide.
3. Practice!
   1. Have this conversation with at least one other person before you talk to a people and get feedback. Ideally you develop comfort with the flow of the conversation you want to have and know how to do things like steer people back on course.
   2. Know what the most important questions are and make sure to prioritize them.
4. Create your notes guide!
   1. Ahead of time, prep a google form/Airtable form, spreadsheet, notes doc or anywhere else you want to store all notes and data captured for every single customer call.
      1. at the top, write out your objectives as it will keep you focused on what you want to learn from them
      2. in each section of the form, spreadsheet, or notes doc, write out your objectives and questions. this will give you a structured way to add in what the customer says and keep your notes structured. this will help you build a foundation
      3. (optional) add other fields to describe the person - e.g. role, demographics, etc

During the Call

1. Set expectations up front.
   1. Confirm that the time and amount of time still works.
   2. Let them know that there are no right or wrong answers, you simply want to hear their opinions.
   3. Tell them what you are doing with the feedback.
2. Be patient and gracious.
   1. People are giving you their time. Say “thank you!” and acknowledge their feedback.
   2. Acknowledge when you need to switch gears, with visual cues like “Thank you for that. Now I want to talk about [NEW TOPIC]”.
3. Be okay with silence.
   1. Not everyone will answer right away. That’s okay. Some answers will be short.
   2. When you want more detail, empower your customer by asking for more (i.e. “Can you tell me more about that…?” or “I’d love to hear more about what you mean when you say….”).
4. Always be respectful.
   1. Don’t ask inappropriate questions.
   2. Don’t ask about company information you wouldn’t share about your own company.
   3. Don’t press when a customer says they don’t want to talk about something.
5. Give them space to share open feedback at the end.
   1. As you’re wrapping up, ask if there is any other feedback they’d like to share about the product/company.
6. Thank them for their time at the end.

General interview tips:

• Try your best not to interrupt.
• Start with questions that are easy to answer and move towards questions that are harder to answers.
• Focus on questions that are open-ended and non-leading.
• When they start describing their problem, ask follow up questions until you have a specific and firm understanding of it from their POV.
• If you have a prototype or stimulus, make sure that it both works and that your participant can access it. This means that you should set expectations ahead of time if they need to have a device and/or specific software ready.

How to keep calls on track with ‘signposting’:

Signposting is when you provide a verbal signal that you’re going to direct the conversation from one topic to another. You may do this when you’re not making progress in a certain area or when you want to move to another topic. Here are some helpful phrases to use:

• “Shifting gears…”
• “Thank you for that. Now I’d like for us to focus on…”
• “One thing that we haven’t talked about yet is…”

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