(Just been talking with somebody about getting a team better at customer interviewing — which reminded me of a thread on the hellsite I wrote after John Cutler asked for something similar. So reproducing and lightly expanding here for easier reference, and because I’m allowed to have shitty incomplete first drafts of stuff here :-)
Ingredients:
- Zoom, or your group chat app of choice.
- Miro, Mural, post-it notes + camera — whatever you can use to share stickies/notes as a group. Use Google Sheets/Docs at a pinch
- Google docs, or your shared text editor of choice
- Calendly for bookings — or something else that lets you easily book in remote meetings onto a calendar
Preparation:
Get together on the shared text editor. Come up with an overarching research question. Hopefully pinned to your actual company strategy/active discovery work.
(I should write a lot here about ways you can figure out decent research questions. But I’m currently on my Christmas break and I don’t want to, because it would turn this into a much, much longer article. The short version: If you end up with something like “Do they want to use feature X?” you’re doing it wrong. The long version: go read Indi Young’s or Steve Portigal’s books.)
Then, as a group, write every dumb question you can think of around that pokes at that research question.
Then, as a group, group related questions together. Maybe switch over to Miro/Mural — but sticking with google docs can work as well.
Start asking “What higher level questions would evoke a story around that group of questions?”.
Repeat.
Carry on repeating.
This often works it way up to questions like “Tell me about the last time you did X?” or “Tell me about your typical day doing Y?”
(Don’t throw the more specific questions away — having a hierarchy of questions from general to concrete can be super useful if you want to probe around specific areas. But the more general story-based questions are going to end up being your workhorses.)
Practice:
Our preparation gives us research question, topics of interest, and a hierarchy of possible questions around those topics.
Time to talk to a customer… NOT!
Time in fact to rehearse. Rotate around the group. One interviewer. One interviewee. Everybody else observers.
Practice introductions, getting consent signed off (consent, in this as in everything, is important), making the video recording work, etc.
Lead off with the high level questions. Listen for the topics coming up — maybe assign different observers to different topics. Experiment. Let the interviewer follow up with open questions, reflecting what the interviewer said, etc.
(“Can you tell me more about X?” — where X is something they said earlier — is a super question to help dive deeper, or redirect the conversation that’s gone off track.)
You mostly won’t need the low-level questions — but if a topic area doesn’t get mentioned you can probe with more specific questions.
After each mock interview reflect. What did we see/hear? What better questions could we have asked? Knock off the rough edges.
Repeat.
For zoom get all the observers to switch off their cameras, then you can set the display to hide non-viewers which can help the interviewer/interviewee focus.
Perform:
When you stop finding ways to improve your observation practice / questions — time to find some actual live participants. But do proper consent forms and do a verbal ask on recording as well to double check. Go talk to your ResearchOps or User Research folk for this if you have them.
Block out a day into blocks of interviewing time + decompression/discussion time. 30/15m or 60/30m feel about right. Remember time for lunch. Setup calendly to book out the slots. Fill ’em. If you get a no-show use it as another practice round.
(and if I wasn’t feeling lazy I’d fill out some bits on decent note taking advice and analysis/synthesis type stuff here — so go read some Books to Get Your Customer Interviewing Practice Up and Running instead.)
The other sneaky thing you’ll notice when you do this as a group activity is that… it’s often better than the results you get when you do it solo.
You have multiple brains in the room poking at refining the research question. More people finding good questions to evoke stories from customers. More ears to hear and interpret what the customer has to say.
TL;DR: Building the muscles for doing customer interviewing can be a fun group exercise.
ttfn.