User interviews may occur in the unlikeliest of places. How prepare are you for your next impromptu deep dive?
Curiosity can strike without warning—and it’s lovely.
I was scripting some questions in my notebook earlier today as my client and I are going through the discovery process related to their in-person training courses for businesses and individuals interested in being first-aid trained. With a list of assumptions in hand, we wanted to validate them with real user feedback from both customers and our service staff.
As I referenced in my previous post, these Post-It Note maps had actually be started a week or two before I started working at this nationwide, non-profit company. Their internal CX and marketing teams were the ones formally leading the user research charge here, but I've quickly been making myself known around the office.
If we're going to have any hope of making successful changes to our products with lessened risk, we were going to have to start asking better questions than, "On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the booking process?"
Anyways, after studying these wall-to-wall collections of stories, pains, emotions, and more, I had picked out certain ones that I thought would make for good benchmarks. Moments that we could craft some solid business metrics around; giving us a way to checkpoint our improvements or gaps in revamping the service and products on offer. Ideas that we could seek to validate through post-experience discussions to further guide our decisions and direction.
A neat little trick I’ve found is to take the a few user stories of interest and pretend that they're the answers you want to hear to questions you haven't yet asked. I appreciate that you probably needed to read that a second time because it takes some backwards thinking.
What I’m trying to do is prove or disprove the assumptions we’ve mapped out, but through a line of customer enquiry that isn’t leading nor easily answered by yes / no’s. It’s a skill that takes practice, especially when thinking on the fly.
Once I felt like I had a solid set of questions on paper, I wanted to put them in a place that is accessible to anyone in the team and can invite collaboration and comments. I choose to use the online, collaborative card tool, Trello. I like its simple organisational structure and quick ability to create new cards and checkbox lists. Plus, it’s quite easy to view it from my phone.
I’m going to give myself a wee little pat on the back for this forward-thinking—bear with me a moment—because this turned out to be a great decision.
A few hours later, my girlfriend and I were finishing a big, at-home dinner with her family, when her mother off-handedly mentioned that she’s going to one of my company’s first-aid training courses tomorrow. Did she know I was working on this or just making coincidental conversation? It was totally out of the blue and I don’t think I had told them yet that I was about to start a series of customer interviews on this very topic!
This is what I meant by readiness at the start of this post; sometimes learning opportunities present themselves and are too good to pass up. All of my digitised questions and notes at my fingertips on my phone.
Within the next hour, I had uncovered more about the course booking process and captured a whole slew of enlightening quotes worth sharing around the office. Best of all, this unplanned research session was completely free!
Doing the dishes was the least I could offer. An insightful meal, no doubt, and it wouldn’t have been as well run if I hadn’t loaded my research questions and concepts up in the cloud.