Preparing for Interviews

To make the most out of your interviews, you should sufficiently prepare your team before each one. Having a plan for your interview will make it much more smoother and make sure you cover all the important areas in one sitting.

Use these steps to help you prepare and plan for an interview.

Steps

• Brainstorm with your team the questions you can ask to maximize the spread of potential questions. Remember to build on one another’s ideas.
• After the brainstorming session, group the potential questions into areas or themes. After you have identified all the themes your questions belong to, try to figure out the best order of themes that would ensure a smooth flow of conversation. Are there themes that are slightly more probing? Then put them towards the middle of the interview. Additionally, if one theme builds on another, it would be good for them to follow one after another.
• The last step to preparing your interview is to polish the questions. Remove repeated questions and consolidate or separate questions where necessary. Make sure your questions allow you to tap into the emotions of your interviewee.

Conducting an Interview

Here are some tips you can use when conducting your interviews with users:

Ask why, even if you think you know the answer. Don’t assume to know what users are thinking or feeling—sometimes, their answer might surprise you. Ask for anecdotes. When asking users about their experiences, try to tease out stories of what they did in the recent past, rather than asking about generic experiences. For example, ask them about the last time they used a recipe app, instead of asking about their experience with recipe apps in general.

5 Whys Method

The “5 Whys” method is a simple method you can use to dig deep and uncover useful insights about their behavior.

Ask our users “Why?” whenever they explain something to you. Each time you ask “Why?” you will prompt someone to re-evaluate their position in order to dig a little deeper into their own reasoning.

It may seem a little odd to keep asking “Why?” at first, but it will bring great insights while allowing you to dig deeper in order to find the root cause(s) of their behavior.

Practicing the “5 Whys” method is also useful to get you used to the idea of asking your interviewees or users “Why?” even though you think you already know the answer.

Individual Interviews

Interviews really are the crux of empathy. Human-centered design is about getting to the people you’re designing for and hearing from them in their own words. Interviews can be a bit daunting, but by following these steps below you’ll unlock all kinds of insights and understanding that you’ll never get sitting behind your desk. Whenever possible, conduct your interviews in the interviewee’s space. You can learn so much about a person’s mindset, behavior, and lifestyle by talking with them where they live or work.

Steps

• No more than three research team members should attend any single interview so as to not overwhelm the participant or crowd the location. Each team member should have a
  clear role (i.e. interviewer, note-taker, and photographer).
• Come prepared with a set of questions you’d like to ask. Start by asking broad questions about the person’s life, values, and habits, before asking more specific questions that relate directly to your challenge.
• Make sure to write down exactly what the person says, not what you think they might mean. This process is all about hearing exactly what people are saying. If you’re relying on a translator, make sure her or she understands that you want direct quotes, not the gist of what the interviewee says.
• What the person says is only one data point. Be sure to observe your interviewee’s body language and the context.

Group Interviews

Though a Group Interview may not offer the depth of an individual Interview it can give you a compelling look at how a larger set of the people you’re designing for operates. The best Group Interviews seek to hear everyone’s voice, get diverse opinions, and are strategic about group makeup. For example, an all-female group might give insight into the role of women in a society whereas a mixed group may not. If you’re looking to get smart quickly on what is valuable, Group Interviews are a great place to start.

Steps

• Identify the sort of group you want to interview. If you’re trying to learn something specific, organize the group so that you have the best chance at hearing it.
• Convene the Group Interview on neutral ground, perhaps a shared community space that people of all ages, races, and genders will have access to.
• In a Group Interview, be certain to have one person asking the questions and other team members taking notes and capturing what the group is saying.
• Come prepared with a strategy to engage the quieter members of the group. This can mean asking them questions directly or finding ways to make the more vocal members of the group recede for the moment.
• Group Interviews are a great setting to identify who you might want to go deeper with in an individual Co-Creation Session.

Building Empathy with Analogies

An analogy is a comparison between two things, for example, a comparison of a heart to a pump. Analogies are a great way for us to build empathy towards users and for generating new ideas around a problem. Use analogies to gain a fresh way of looking at an environment, and in instances where direct observation is hard to achieve.

Start by identifying the aspects of a situation that are most important, interesting, or problematic. For instance, if you are working on improving a supermarket experience, a of the key aspect might handling long waiting lines.

Find other experiences that contain some of these aspects—it will help you gain a better understanding of your users’ problems, and it will also spark new ideas to improve their experiences. Long waiting lines, for example, are also present in airports, hospital A&E departments, and even in Apple Stores after the launch of a new product.

Create an inspiration space for analogies. You can do so by pinning photos and anecdotes of the analogous experiences you have found. This helps your team spark inspiration and create insights.

Journey Map

A journey map is a detailed record of a user’s experience of doing something. It could either be constructed based on your observations and interviews with the user, or it could be something that you ask the user to draw out and explain. It would contain a journey that the user goes through, and could be either closely relevant or even tangential to the focus of your project.

For instance, you could document the journey of a user’s experience of waking up in the morning and making their way to work via public transport. Try to be as comprehensive as possible, rather than filtering out details that you assume to be meaningless or irrelevant. You could organize the journey map in whatever way you think is most effective, from a timeline to a series of images.

A journey map can help you build empathy towards your users as you try to experience what they go through. It can also uncover insights, such as when you compare journeys between users to find common threads or find conflicting behaviors within a user’s journey.

Peers Observing Peers

You’ll be talking to a lot of people as part of the Inspiration Phase, but learning from the people you’re designing for can also mean empowering them do some of the research themselves and then share back with you. You may also find that social and gender dynamics, or research around a sensitive subject, like sexual health for example, may limit how much the people you’re designing for are willing to tell you. By bringing the people you’re designing for in as partners in your research and giving them the tools to capture their own attitudes, opinions, and hopes, you’ll learn more than you ever could on your own.

Steps

• Start by determining how you want to learn. It could be through Interviews, photos, Collages, Card Sorts, etc.
• Outfit the person you’re designing for with what she’ll need—a camera perhaps, art supplies, a notebook and pen, etc—and take her through the observation and reporting process.
• Offer support throughout the observation and reporting process. Make certain that she knows that there is no right answer and that you only want the honest opinions, hopes, and fears of the people she talks to.
• When she’s done, collect what she’s produced, but also be sure to Interview her about how the process went. You’ll want more than just the facts, so be sure to find out what surprised or inspired her, how her opinions might have changed, and what she learned about her peers.

Body Language

What you don’t say can be as important as what you do. The right body language, eye contact, and facial expressions can help you learn more and engage deeply.

The goal of an Interview is to really understand the experiences, needs, and desires of the person you’re designing for, and your body language can play a big part in the process. It may sound simple, but keeping good eye contact, nodding and smiling as a way to reinforce what a person is saying, and giving nonverbal cues to validate what you’re hearing can be powerful.

Steps

• Ensure that your body is on the same level as the person you’re interviewing. If they are sitting on the floor, sit beside them. If they’re working at a market, stand and face them.
• Make and keep eye contact. Smile and nod your head to communicate that you are listening to them and they have your full attention.
• Taking notes is another physical cue to the person that you’re listening and appreciate what they say.
• You may be tempted to fill a moment of silence with a personal anecdote. But keep focused on the person you’re interviewing—make them the center of attention.
• You’re building empathy with the person you’re designing for, and they’re building it with you. They may even ask you for advice on an issue but remember that you’re not here to offer solutions, you’re here to observe and learn

Aristotle’s 7 Elements of Good Storytelling

Aristotle’s seven elements of good storytelling helps us empathize with the people we design for by asking the right questions. Asking the right questions will help us understand and tell the most essential stories about our users’ needs, motivations, and problems. Aristotle’s points can also show us how storytelling can help increase empathy in a Design Thinking project.

Plot

What are the character(s) doing? What are they trying to accomplish? The story plot tells us about a person’s change in fortune (either from good to bad, or from bad to good), and is usually about overcoming some kind of obstacle or challenge. In a Design Thinking project, the story plot tells us about struggles and how people try to improve aspects of their lives.

Character

Who are the people? What are their traits, their personalities? What are their backgrounds, needs, aspirations, and emotions? Storytelling in Design Thinking, most obviously, relates to gaining an empathic understanding of the people for whom we are designing. When we tell stories about our users, it is not sufficient to know facts about them, like their appearances or income; for a fully fleshed out character, we need insights into their needs, motivations, and emotions.

Theme

The theme of a story tells us the overarching obstacle that needs to be crossed, or the end goal of the project. Use a theme to help keep yourself focused and provide your team with a strong narrative to keep you going.

Dialogue

What are the people saying? Do they say different things when you observe them as compared to when you interview them? Are they angry, disappointed, sad, or happy? While observing their dialogue, are you losing focus on the things they did not say? It is also crucial to keep track of how we, the observers, speak to the people we are observing. Having a superior or condescending tone when conversing with our users is a sure way to get their guards up and put a limit on how much we can learn from them.

Melody/Chorus

To be effective, your stories should have a chorus that resonates with your emotions and convictions. The power of storytelling often lies in its ability to stir emotion and motivate us to find a solution.

Decor

Decor is about the setting. It’s about the physical environment in which your characters perform their acts. What’s the decor, setting, and physical environment in which your users perform their acts like? Effective storytelling does not ignore the setting, because often the interactions between characters and the set will tell us a lot about their motivations and behaviors. As a design thinker, you should pay attention to the opportunities or obstacles present in your users’ environments.

Spectacle

Are there any plot twists in your stories? Any unexpected insights about your users? The spectacle is something that the audiences who listen to your story will remember, and will generate discussions and ideas. If your design thinking story includes a spectacle, it will be a powerful tool to drive the project forward.

Point of View – Problem Statement

When you want to create an actionable problem statement which is commonly known as the Point of View (POV) in Designing Thinking you should always base your Point Of View on a deeper understanding of your specific users, their needs and your most essential insights about them. In the Design Thinking process, you will gain those insights from your research and fieldwork in the Empathize mode.

Your Point of View is Your Guide

Your Point of View (POV) defines the RIGHT challenge to address in the following mode in the Design Thinking process. which is the Ideation mode.

A good POV will allow you to ideate and solve your design challenge in a goal-oriented manner in which you keep a focus on your users, their needs and your insights about them.

Your POV should never contain any specific solution, nor should it contain any indication as to how to fulfill your users’ needs in the service, experience, or product you’re designing. Instead, your POV should provide a wide enough scope for you and your team to start thinking about solutions which go beyond status quo. However, you should construct a fairly narrowly-focused problem statement or POV, as this will generate a greater quantity and higher quality solutions when you and your team start generating ideas.

How Do You Define Your Point of View?

Define the type of person you are designing for—your user.

Select the most essential needs, which are the most important to fulfill. Again, extract and synthesize the needs you’ve found in your observations, research, fieldwork, and interviews. Remember that needs should be verbs.

Work to express the insights developed through the synthesis of your gathered information. The insight should typically not be a reason for the need, but rather a synthesized statement that you can leverage in your designing solution.

POV Template

Write your definitions into a Point Of View template which considers the user, their needs, and your insights.

POV Mad Lib

You can articulate a POV by combining these three elements—user, need, and insight—as an actionable problem statement that will drive the rest of your design work. It’s surprisingly easy when you insert your findings in the POV Mad lib below. You can articulate your POV by inserting your information about your user, the needs and your insights in the following sentence:

[User … (descriptive)] needs [Need … (verb)] because [Insight … (compelling)]

Make Sure That Your Point Of View is One That:

• Provides a narrow focus.
• Frames the problem as a problem statement.
• Inspires your team.
• Guides your innovation efforts.
• Informs criteria for evaluating competing ideas.
• Is sexy and captures people’s attention.
• Is valid, insightful, actionable, unique, narrow, meaningful, and exciting.

How Might We… ?

When you’ve defined your design challenge in a problem statement or a Point Of View (POV), you can start opening up for ideas to solve your design challenge by asking “How Might We.”

Why and When to Ask “How Might We”

The “How Might We” question purposely maintains a level of ambiguity, and opens up the exploration space to a range of possibilities. It’s a re-wording of the core users, their needs and your insights about them, which you have uncovered through a deeper interrogation of the problem in your research phase, the Empathize mode in Design Thinking—and synthesized in the Define mode in Design Thinking. You’re now moving on to the third mode—Ideation.

“How” suggests that we do not yet have the answer and helps us set aside prescriptive briefs.

“Might” emphasizes that our responses may only be possible solutions, not the only solution.

“We” suggests that the idea for the solution lies in our collective teamwork.

“How Might We” (HMW) questions are the best way to open up Brainstorm and other Ideation sessions. HMW opens up to Ideation sessions where you explore ideas that can help you solve your design challenge. By framing your challenge as a How Might We question, you’ll prepare yourself for an innovative solution in the Ideation phase.

The “How Might We” method is constructed in such a way that it opens the field for new ideas, admits that we do not currently know the answer, and encourages a collaborative approach to solving it.

For example, if your POV is: “Teenage girls need … to eat nutritious food … in order to thrive and grow in a healthy way.”

The HMW question may go as follows:

• How Might We make healthy eating appealing to young females?
• How Might We inspire teenage girls towards healthier eating options?
• How Might We make healthy eating something, which teenage girls aspire towards?

Best Practice Guide to Asking “How Might We”

Without a statement of a clear vision or goal in a well-framed Point Of View, “How Might We” is obviously meaningless. Your Point Of View which is neither too narrow so as to make it overly restrictive, nor too broad so as to leave you wandering forever in infinite possibilities.

Begin with your Point of View (POV) or problem statement. Start by rephrasing and framing your Point Of View as several questions by adding “How Might We” at the beginning.

Break that larger POV challenge up into smaller actionable and meaningful questions. Five to ten “How Might We” questions for one POV is a good starting point.

It is often helpful to brainstorm the HMW questions before the solutions brainstorm.

Look at your “How Might We” questions and ask yourself if they allow for a variety of solutions. If they don’t, broaden them. Your “How Might We” questions should generate a number of possible answers and will become a launch pad for your Ideation Sessions, such as Brainstorms.