Tips & tricks for a good interview

This document was made with help from Marita Skjuve (SINTEF).

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 list of tips & tricks to help you get the most out of your interview or download the printable version to keep for reference. Still hungry for more? Check out further readings here and here.

The tips and tricks are structured into three categories

1. To help you prepare and get into the right mindset.

2. To help you structure the interview process and questions.

3. To help you phrase yourself correctly.

1: Preparation

• It is OK to feel nervous. It can be scary to do interviews. You may feel you are being evaluated as an interviewer - and contrary to what you may think, interviewing someone you know may even be worse! Don't let this stop you from doing the interview, but rest assured: you're not the only one feeling nervous.

• Remind yourself why you are doing the interview. You're not looking to just confirm something, or for a yes/no answer: you want to understand the why and the how behind people's behaviour.

• Prepare for difficult participants. They will always be there, so don't feel defeated when you lose control over an interview. Some people are just hard to control. From personal experience, about 1 in 10 interviews will be challenging and the person will talk about anything but what you're interested in.

• Don’t stress about doing every interview the same way. Especially when you're still learning to do interviews, it is a lot better to focus on doing the best you can every time, rather than doing it the same way every time.

• Influencing your participant is unavoidable.You should definitely try to be neutral, but if you don't manage it's not the end of the world. Sometimes you influence a participant without being aware of it at the moment. If you think something you did may have influenced the results, just be open about it; “the participants seemed overly optimistic, possibly because they knew that I had made the prototype”.

Structuring

• At the start of each interview…

  • Spend time to create a calm situation and make the person comfortable in the beginning. Having some recent news topics (or the weather!) to chit-chat about is a great start.
  • When you introduce yourself, think about how you're positioning yourself. For example, it may be good to at least give the impression that you did not make the product so the participant feels free to give negative feedback too.

• Debriefing Be grateful when you end the interview! Participants can often feel unsure if they did a good job, so highlight that and allow them to leave with a good feeling.

• Continuous improvement.Don’t be scared to change the interview guide! If you have insights that would make the next interview better, use them!

• Midway evaluation.When you're halfway through your interviews (e.g. you've done 3 out of the planned 6), do a midway evaluation. Summarise just based on memory what has come up in the interviews and share it with a coworker to see if the preliminary results highlight other areas that would be interesting to explore. Better to identify these when you can change the interview guide then when you’re finished.

• Which questions you ask and how you store the answers depend on who wants the results.If you interview on behalf of someone else, for example your design department, you need to make sure that you gather information so that it is helpful for them. Feedback such as “the participants hated the chatbot, or they loved it” is not very useful for a designer because they need to know why and how. In those cases, it is often very helpful to provide suggestions for changes that can be done. Since you were there to see the participants, you have accessed information that is not in the interview notes per se, and it is very nice, as a designer, to have some initial options or the interviewer's interpretation of what can be done to fix something.

3: Tips for speaking

• Use silence.Sometimes we can be too eager to jump on something. But some participants just need some time to think. By remaining silent, you invite the participant to go into more detail - even though it may feel a little awkward.

  • "That's a good point." [PAUSE until they speak again].

• Open ended questions are the best.

  • "What do you think about this?"
  • "What do you expect will happen if you do this/that?"

• Always ask why or how it could be done differently - even if it feels stupid.

• Write down the interesting things that people mention. These can make for great material when you near the end of the interview, or run out of questions to ask: "Earlier you mentioned XX, can you say more about that?"