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One-stop shop for

Interviews
March 2019

1.- Defining your research questions

Gather your team and ask these questions prior allocating any effort in conducting interviews. By
stating clear goals, the whole team will have a north star and it will be easy for everybody to
distinguish the signal from the noise and make evidence-based decisions.

● What do you want to learn about? Users? Product? The organization?

● Do you want to explore new ideas and gather insights? (generative research) or validate
hypotheses? (evaluative research).
● What are the riskiest assumptions the team is making?
● How can these assumptions be mitigated?

2.- Types of questions (based on Steve Portigal work)

Now it is time to build your toolkit of questions to meet your research. You cannot ask the
research questions directly to your participants, as you need to rephrase them so they feel more
natural, and thus allowing them to answer them better.

● About sequence: Walk me through a typical day in your job.

● About quantity: How many emails do you read a day?
● Ask for specific examples: What was the last time you purchased something online?
● Ask about exceptions: Can you walk me through one time the system drove you crazy?
● Ask for the complete list: What are all the enterprise applications you get to use on a
weekly basis?
● Ask about relationships: How do you collaborate with other team members?
● Ask about organizational structure: Who do the people in that department report to?
● Ask for clarification: You mentioned ‘this’ earlier, you’re talking about the content
management system, right?
● Ask about code words/native language: ‘Why do you call it the bat cave’?
 ● Ask about emotional cues: ‘Why do you laugh when you mention Best Buy’?
● Ask why: Why do you think that happened?
● Probe delicately: You talked earlier about a hard situation that change your way of work.
Can you tell me what that situation was?
● Explain to an outsider: Let’s say that I’ve just arrived here from another decade, how
would you explain to me the differences between Alexa skills and chatbots?
● Teach another: If you had to ask your daughter to operate this system, how would you
explain to her?
● Compare processes: What’s the difference between DesignOps and DevOps practices?
● Compare to others: Do the other Project Managers also run retrospectives this way?
● Compare across time: How have your morning routine changed in the past 2 years?

3.- Examples of questions

These are some tried-and-true questions you can include in your interview guide:

For Stakeholder Interviews (based on Design for the Digital Age) and Just Enough Research
● How long have you been in this role?
● What does your day-to-day look like?
● What are some of the activities and responsibilities you have?
● Who are some people and teams you get to work with?
● What is your role with respect to this product?
● What should this project accomplish for the business?
● What are some of the challenges you anticipate for this project? 4.- Debugging your
questions

For User Interviews

● What does a typical day look like?
● Do you have any hobbies?
● How much time do you spend on…?
● Walk me through the last time you….
● What are your thoughts on...
● How do you...

For Hiring Interviews

● Walk me through one of the projects of your portfolio
● How did the project get started?
 ● Who was involved in the team?
● How did you handle business requirements and expectations?
● What was challenging about the project?
● How long did the project take?
● How did you manage to overcome the challenges?
● What would you have done differently?
● How do you collaborate with developers? Stakeholders?
● What are your design principles?

4.- Debugging your questions

Run this checklist when you already assembled your interview questions, in order to avoid biased
answers that might not give as many valuable insights.

❏ Questions are not leading; they don’t bias the response of the participant.
❏ Questions are not loaded; they don’t assume anything about the participant.
❏ Questions invite participants to share stories, instead of leading to binary answers.
❏ Questions don’t include word complexity which might make the participant feel
uncomfortable.
❏ Questions don’t encourage social desirability bias, when users inaccurately report
behavior to show themselves in the best possible light.
❏ Questions are not double-barreled; asking for two answers at the same time.

5.- Example of Script

You will need an intro to set expectations. Feel free to pick this snippet and adapt it to your
project.

Hello, _______ Thanks a lot for agreeing to come in, I really appreciate it.
My name is _______ and I’m going to be walking you through the session today.

You might already know why are we here, but let me go over it again. We’re currently
[______insert your high level goal here_______] and it is valuable for us to have feedback and
perspectives such as yours, in order for us to learn more, and make better decisions. That’s why
I’ll be asking you some questions, but this doesn’t mean I will be testing you, I just want to learn
from your experience. There are no right or wrong answers. Do you have any questions before
we begin?

Great! Also, is it possible to record the session for documentation purposes? It will be shown
internally only.
Thank you very much, _________ I’d like to start by asking you some questions about yourself
and your day-to-day….