I’m cited in Developing Your Interviewing Skills, Part I: Preparing for an Interview, with a set of question types. The article suggests those question types are helpful in preparing an interview guide. I think they are also very helpful in the interview itself, as you will often have to probe a number of different ways to get at what you are think is interesting.

Anyway, I’m not sure where the author found that set of questions, but I’ve recently rewritten and restructured them for the book. This seemed like a great opportunity to share them with everyone. I’d love your feedback: What am I missing? Do you disagree? What else would be more helpful for readers?

Questions to gather context and collect details

• Ask about sequence “Describe a typical workday. What do you do when you first sit down at your station?-Then what do you do next?”
• Ask about quantity “How many files would you delete when that happens?”
• Ask for specific examples “What is the last movie that you streamed?” – Compare this to “What movies do you stream?” The specific is easier to answer than the general and becomes a platform for follow up questions.
• Ask for the complete list “What are all the different apps you have installed on your smartphone?” – This will require a series of follow up questions, e.g., “What else?” because few people will be able to generate an entire list of something with some prompting.
• Ask about relationships “How do you work with new vendors?” – This general question is especially appropriate when you don’t even know enough to ask a specific question (e.g. in comparison to the earlier example about streaming movies). Better to start general than to be presumptive with a too-specific question.
• Ask about organizational structure “Who does that department report to?”

Questions to probe on what’s unsaid

• Ask for clarification “When you refer to “that” you are talking about the newest server, right?”
• Ask about code words/native language “Why do you call it the ‘Batcave?'”
• Ask about emotional cues “Why do you laugh when you mention ‘Best Buy?'”
• Ask why “I’ve tried to get my boss to adopt this format, but she just won’t do it-” “Why do you think she hasn’t?”
• Probe delicately “You mentioned a difficult situation that changed your usage. Can you tell us what that situation was?”
• Probe without presuming “Some people have very negative feelings about Twitter, while others don’t. What is your take?” – Rather than the direct “What do you think about Twitter?” or “Do you like Twitter?” this question introduces options that aren’t tied to the interviewer or the interviewee.
• Explain to an outsider “Let’s say that I’ve just arrived here from another decade, how would you explain to me the difference between smartphones and tablets?”
• Teach another “If you had to ask your daughter to operate your system, how would you explain it to her?”

Questions that create contrasts in order uncover frameworks and mental models

• Compare processes “What’s the difference between sending your response by fax, mail or email?”
• Compare to others “Do the other coaches also do it that way?”
• Compare across time “How have your family photo activities changed in the past five years? How do you think they will be different give years from now?” – The second question is not intended to capture an accurate prediction. Rather, the question serves to break free from what exists now and envision possibilities that may emerge down the road. Identify the appropriately large time horizon (a year? Five years? Ten years?) that will help people to think beyond incremental change.

As we get into actual fieldwork this week, we’ll be using (as is typical for us) a mashup of techniques. In addition to interviewing people, we’ll be watching how and where they read books or Kindles. But we’ll also want to get into a discussion of future possibilities. Reading Ahead is not about evaluating existing designs but instead getting inspiration and information that can drive future designs. So we don’t have anything to test, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use testing-like (“What do you think of this?”) activities. In this case, we’ve built extremely simple representations that suggest book and digital reader.

Dan building a thing-to-hold for this week’s interviews

The idea (and we’ll learn what happens once we do a couple of interviews) is to have something neutral to put into people’s hands and let them gesture, sketch, or otherwise perform, so the activity of discussing the future isn’t just a verbal one. We’re going to ask people to draw on these props, and then we’ll have an artifact created by the participants themselves. Those artifacts can be compelling, and can also be a much more impactful symbol of what took place in that part of the interview.

We’ve never used this exact prop before, but in just about every project we’ll come up with a range of tools to use in the field. Our interviews are very open-ended so we could use either of the props to explore any emergent themes, depending on what we use them to talk about (From “How would you hold this?” to “Well, if it did come with your Happy Meal, draw what you’d expect to see on the main screen.”

For more, see Moving with a Magic Thing (PDF) and Design the Box

Before we go out in the field we write an interview guide (or field guide), a list of all the topics we want to cover.

Interview guides end up being very linear and structured, but the interactions we have in the field are looser and more conversational. We’ll let the way we pose our questions flow much more from what the person we’re interviewing is saying than from the sequence and phrasings of the interview guide.

Even though we know this will happen, we’ve still been working hard to hash out our questions ahead of time–even the basic ones. It’s like John McLaughlin said about jazz improvisation: you have to learn all the chords so that you can forget about them.

The interview guide is also something for everyone (including our clients) to look at, to make sure we’re all on the same page as we head into fieldwork.

Our interview guide for Reading Ahead is here.

From our Design Research Methods class, some observations from an interviewing exercise.

The scenario was to conduct interviews in order to uncover opportunities in helping people to manage food, meals, nutrition, etc.

The question asked was
What are the challenges you face in meal preparation?

Of course, that question is flawed because it presumes that there are indeed challenges. This was evident when the respondent struggled with how to answer outside the frame of the question.

An alternative might be
Are there any challenges in meal preparation?
which is is more open-ended.

But better still is
What are your feelings about the experience of meal-preparation?
since it doesn’t put the label challenges into play. It would be important to understand the labels the person being interviewed places on the different aspects of their experience, and to use their terminology to probe further.

Also worth noting is that the original question came right off the sample interview guide I distributed. Sometimes the interview guide is a tool to document “questions you want answers to” rather than “questions you want to ask”; doing fieldwork involves a lot of translation back and forth between the two.