Interview or usability test checklist

Interviews are a great tool to get insights into what your customers are thinking and why. If you're reading this document, that means you're about to conduct an interview of your own: great work already! Scroll down to find a useful checklist to help you set up and execute a great interview, or download the printable checklist below.

We also have more generic tips and tricks for when doing the interview. You can find those here.

Setting up and preparation

• What is your main question?Why are you doing this interview? What is the problem or what is the answer that you're interested in?

• Who do you need to talk to?Describe the intended audience. Do they need to have a specific age, gender, living location? Do they need to have used your platform / app / company, and if so, how long ago can their last experience be?

• How many do you need to talk to?Take a look at your main question. Is it specific to a certain situation or dilemma, or is it more generic to assess opinions? The more generic it is, the more people you'll probably need.
  Consider using a rolling group size: start with 3, and assess if all three added different insights. Add another 3, and assess again: are they starting to repeat the things you heard earlier? Make a call at each "step" whether you think the next batch will bring more new information or not.

  > It is more valuable to do an interview than it is to not do any: go for what you have time and resources for.

• How long do you want to talk to each person?Longer is not necessarily better. Remember that you're using someone else's time: it has to be worth it to keep them. If you run out of things to talk about, or if the participant has no more insights, feel free to stop the interview even if that means it is shorter than the rest.

• Location: physical or online?We can be honest: a physical interview gives you more bang for your buck. You get to see the participant in real life (and real time) and read body language. But it's also harder to set up. You need a location, and your participants need to be able to get there. Online interviews on the other hand require no travel time from your participants and no physical location from you. Just make sure to turn the camera on so you don't miss out on those valuable facial expressions.

• What is the prototype that your participants will look at?You are doing this interview because you have a question. What do your participants need to see in order for you to ask that question? For example, if you're interested in finding out what people think about your opening message, you need to prepare the opening message flow that you'd like to test - or potentially multiple versions to get comparisons - and have a place ready where that flow works. A demo page with a filter could work, or if you use staging, it could be the test environment.

Interview guide

You want to keep the interviews as comparable as possible. That means that all your participants need to have the same experience, more or less. By far the easiest way to do that is to write down ahead of time what you're going to say and when. The document where you keep track of that content is called "the interview guide". Below you find the parts that should be included in this guide.

• How are you greeting the participants?Each participant needs to be greeted the same way: with the same kind of energy, and using the same story or background information. Prepare a paragraph on who you are, why you are doing the test, and what information they need to know before you guide them to the task.
  As mentioned in the tips and tricks, it is a good thing to be mindful of how you present yourself. If the participant thinks you built the VA, they may not be as critical as they should be.

• How are you introducing the main question?Prepare the task that the participant will need to complete. The rule of thumb here is that you want to be clear, using as little information as possible. For example, if your question is "what is the experience of our users when they use our VA to ask about a faulty invoice", consider the following examples:

  > A bad example: "You have a problem with your invoice: it doesn't show all the information you're used to. So you want to get in touch with the bank."

  This task is not clear - getting in touch with the bank does not mean that they need to use your VA. Moreover, the task is not using as little information as possible. The problem is described in too much detail, which increases the risk of your participant testing only that specific scenario.

  > A good example: "Talk to the chatbot in the lower right corner because you have a problem with your invoice."

• What follow-up questions do you want to ask?Make a list of potential questions you'd like to ask the participant, in order of how you'd like to ask them. Examples are:

  > "What are you thinking now?"

  > "What did you expect would happen?"