The past three weeks have been dedicated to client interviews and they have been learning moments. As a student I've thrown together interviews for barely relevant projects before. Which meant I'd never been particularly invested in the outcome or the quality but mainly focussed on getting them done within reasonable parameters.
This time was different because this project is different. I've spent almost two months working on this graduation project and it's very important to me that it's valid and of high quality. So I took a different approach and in doing so, learned some new things.
Not for an 'end of days' scenario but preparing for your interviews has an enormous impact in how well your interview will go.
There are a few things I'd always suggest doing before you start interviewing people if you aren't that experienced to doing interviews :
1) Read up on interview techniques and be aware of them. There are different important tips for different types of interviews. Some common tips are :Â
Ask open-ended questions.
Ask for clarification where there is uncertainty. (you won't get a chance after the interviews ended)
Motivate your participants to recall examples of situations and reward storytelling.
Turn the interview into a conversation.
But be sure to steer your participant back to the topic of discussion if they stray too far.Â
2) Write down your assumptions. You might be surprised to learn that what you had expected to find and what you actually do find. By writing down these assumptions it's easier to keep them separate from the interview itself. If you skip this step you might risk guiding your participants in the direction you are subconsciously expecting.
3) Write out your interview. Keeping in mind the type of questions you would like to ask. This is your fallback when you get confused or off track during an interview. Make sure you don't have to decipher your own hints. Instead of "Example bad" it's better to write "Could you give me an example of a situation where you had a bad experience with this software?"Â
4) Read up on your participants.Â
Regardless of what that means to you. You are going to be interviewing people, you want them to be at ease. But you also want to make sure you are doing a good job of representing the company you work for, or yourself. So consider where your business-casual lies and dress for it. You don't need to look like a prom-date or a hobo. Somewhere between should be fine.
2) Listen and acknowledge your participant. Let them know you are listening. But not so much that they think you must be hard of hearing or dumb as a rock.Â
3) Record your interview. I can't stress this enough. No matter how closely  you think your memory might come to being eidetic, you are probably forgetting or glossing over parts that you won't notice right now. Writing everything down during the interview is not only a lot of work, it is rude. You are interrupting the flow of the conversation, asking your participant to wait for you to finish writing down what they are saying and you aren't really listening to what they are saying. You aren't giving them the proper attention they deserve. They are helping you out, not the other way around. The way you maintain your conversation is an large part of what makes your participant feel comfortable in sharing their thoughts or not. If you are being rude to them by not really listening, they won't be likely to offer you the best feedback. Would you?Â
There are several available options to record your interview and none of them have to be expensive. If you have a Smartphone you can usually use that to record your interview. Most free note-taking apps on your Smartphone have this basic option.Â
4) Use pen and paper only to write down minor things. Your participant might mention a concept you are not familiar with and would like to ask them about it later that interview but not right now. That's okay. But don't rely on pen and paper or memory to catalog the interview. Â
5) Talk lower. Especially if you are a woman. Although it irks me to give this tip, your participants will feel more comfortable and take you more seriously if you change your voice to sound lower, rather than higher pitched.
6) Inform your participants about what you are doing. Your participants are allowing you to take up an hour of their time because they are interested in being a part of what you are doing. So use some common courtesy and tell them a little bit about yourself, your project, what you are trying to do. If you do this at the beginning of your interview, you are likely already creating a conversation and putting your participant at ease.
After every interview take the time to review how you did. You might listen to the interview in order to write down what you learned, freshening your memory. You'll notice things that you missed before, notice how you didn't ask "And why is that?" when you really should have. And that is okay. Because, after every interview you have a chance to make yourself even better.
1) Be critical of yourself. Listen to what you did right and wrong and make a mental (or actual) note of this. For instance, I wasn't guiding my participants enough. They were getting off track and I wasn't guiding them back to the topic we were supposed to be discussing. I lost a lot of time this way.
2) Tweak your interview. I was noticing after one or two interviews that I wasn't getting an insight into the things that I wanted to know. Instead of powering through with this interview I'd prepared I started over. I was essentially asking the same things as before, but the interview was structured differently. For each topic that I wanted to ask about I wrote down what my goals were with those questions, what was I looking to find out?
3) Write out the interview. I don't mean literally every word. You can use software to turn your recorded interview into written word. You can use this or start typing straight from your interview. During an interview you might find that there was a bit of chaos. You went from topic 1 to 4 to 2 and ending with 3. That's okay. Use this time to write down what the answers were to each question and topic, this doesn't have to be literal, it can be your interpretation.
4) Draw your conclusions. After having listened to your interview and perhaps filling in your interview form so that it's structured in a way that'll allow you to easily refer back to certain answers, write down the conclusions that you draw from the interview. This will be an easily referred back document for a later date. Rather than having to read back 3/4/5 pages of interviews you can refer to the 1 page that mentions what you learned from this interview. This also gives you the chance to think about what you learned, rather than just being a window from the participant to the page. These conclusions help you make your decisions later on in the project.
These three weeks, I've had 7 interviews. Learning the most from the 5 interviews I did after having learned to recap my interviews for myself and improve upon them. For each indepth interview I personalized the questionnaire that I prepared. I also drew conclusions from each interview, making it easy to later present these conclusions to my boss and teacher.
In the end it went much better than I could have anticipated. Largely thanks to constant reviewing and improving upon each interview before attempting the next.
