Who / What?

Make sure you understand the foundational reasons for why you are conducting the interviews.

• What are you going to do?
• Why are you doing the interviews?
• Who are you interviewing?

How? / Interview tips

When working with a co-worker, make sure you both have prepared so you have the same knowledge of the client's expectations, know how you are going to perform the interview, know how you will split the work between you in the most effective way, and create as good of a setup as possible from the beginning. This will help you save time and plan the best way to work as a team. 

How? / Divide the work

In this case, we were two collegues working together on this interview project and there were two different gropus or areas to be interviewed. We decided to divide the work up by each taking one area on which to focus. In that way, we each only needed to understand one area's background information and contact one group of people to setup interview times. However, we decided to do the first interview together at the client's office since the schedule allowed us to. During this interview, the one who prepared for that specific area led the interview, while the other acted as an extra support, as needed.

The setup was structured with information for the interviewee about their rights, what would be expected from them, and what would be expected from us. The most important thing was to make the interviewee feel comfortable in the interview situation in order to get the information needed.   

How? / Question structure

The interview started off with introductory questions that, most likely, were easily answered. Once those were answered, we moved on to more specific questions within different areas such as: specified business & problems, customer-related questions, and competitor & future-focused questions.

How?/ Recording & Conclusion

We received permission from the interviewees to record the interviews. In that way, we were able to focus more on having a dialogue with the interviewee, instead of simply trying to get all the answers down on paper. By recordning, we could easy go back and listen to make sure we did not miss anything.

Since we had recordings of all the interviews, we decided to "transcribe" the interviews - not writing every single word, but summarizing the key answers and findings, according to the interviewees' responses. That meant that we had good, structured documentation, which made it easy to compare and summarize all of the responses from the interview. We could also then create a document of key findings to present to the client. 

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