d.leadership
Coaches’ Guide
Winter 2011
Coaches-Guide-to:
Interviewing
Interviewing is a simple thing to do, but few people often do it. Connecting with users can be inspiring and carry the team throughout the project.
Progress Goal:
A deep and broad understanding of users’ beliefs, values, experiences, preferences, and motivations – and captured notes, which help the team unpack the interviews later.
Learning and Process Goals:
Practice truly listening, and picking up on the comments to dig into.
Learn to get outside of yourself to design for another human.
Question your assumptions, and moving beyond judgment.
Accept a role for the good of the team.
Assume a beginner’s mindset, and be willing to ask questions with seemingly obvious answers.
How to Coach Interviewing
Four keys to good interviewing are:
- Asking Open-Ended Questions
- Digging for Meaning (asking why?)
- Following Unexpected Threads
- Seeking stories
As a coach, you need to model these and also get your team members to do it themselves through encouragement and direction.
Setting the tone:
The goal is for your team to seek understanding. Make sure the team has taken a posture of learning. This may mean airing and acknowledging assumptions up front, and then identifying questions that can test those assumptions.
Brainstorming a few starter questions will help the team figure out what kind of tone they should set, and then you can identify themes and rearrange questions for the proper “flow” based on the tone you see emerge.
Balance:
The most important job of a facilitator is to gauge the pace and depth of the conversation. You want to make sure that your team is conducting the interview itself, but also be willing to dive in and ask a pointed question when it appears that your team is stuck or feels like it’s getting off track.
Your team should not fill more than 40% of the airtime. Make sure they give the user time to answer, and even more, time to consider their answers. Remind your team that silence is not a sign of a bad interview—it is in fact often helpful in needfinding, as many users are uncomfortable with silence, and will fill the void with comments that you would not have uncovered through “sticking to the plan.”
Roles:
It can be overwhelming to a user to have five people all lobbing in questions at the same time or in rapid succession. Make sure your team appreciates the value of a good conversation and capture (more below), and as such, assigns proper roles.
Some suggestions for roles:
- Interview lead—this person keeps eye contact with the user, and sets the pace
- Back-up interviewer—this person stays alert to dig on interesting threads
- Scribe—this person writes down EVERYTHING that the user says
- Observer—this person notes body language, eye contact, setting, etc.
Capture:
It is very important to move into group synthesis with a wealth of human “data,” so make sure that your team takes lots of notes during interviews. As noted above, a couple of people (especially the lead interviewer) will not take any notes at all, so the rest of the team must make up the difference by capturing as much as possible. It’s also a great idea to get a couple of photos of your users and the surrounding area you’ve engaged them in. You can also record video or audio, but realize that review that recording take a significant amount of time.
You Know You Are Doing Well When . . .
The user is talking a lot, and is sharing stories and memories.
You’re discovering unexpected aspects of the problem space.
Your team instinctively follows up on a promising comment/direction.
Common Pitfalls:
Leading the witness: Many inexperienced interviewers will ask loaded questions, or questions that suggest the “right” answer. Make sure to ask open-ended questions.
Not following up: Users will often make very interesting statements that never get pursued by rookie teams—make sure that your team is not so wedded to the interview plan that they aren’t willing to throw the plan out the window when an important theme emerges.
Assuming you know what the answer means: Many times a user will say something that appears familiar, but actually means something very different. Always ask users to elaborate on their responses, particularly when expressing emotions. As a coach, model this behavior by asking for clarification on a seemingly obvious response.
Asking for the “usual” experience: People are terrible at gauging “average” experiences—instead of asking “what usually happens . . .” or “when do you usually…” ask about “the last time,” and extremes like the best, the worst, the last, and the first.
Coaches-Guide-to:
Unpacking and Synthesis
Unpacking is the transition from empathy intake to define distillation and output. Synthesis is considering the relationships of your findings and making sense of them. Both are best done as a group, and can coalesce a team around shared thinking.
Progress Goal:
Stories from empathy work aired and captured via headlines, sketches, photos, and artifacts.
Patterns, groupings, nuggets, and surprises explored to identify user attributes, needs and insights.
Learning and Process Goals:
Practice storytelling and listening with an ear for real-time nugget identification (a nugget is an unrefined part of an insight).
Model and encourage asking questions that probe for deeper understanding.
Explore potential insights with a discovery mindset, without getting overly attached to ideas.
Headlining and visual capture of findings.
How to Coach Unpacking and Synthesis
The approach to unpacking can be summarized in three parts:
- Share and Capture
- Saturate and Group
- Build to User Attributes, Needs and Insights
As a coach, guide your team through this difficult process, balancing participating with passive coaching, and working to elicit the output from your team members.
Share and Capture:
Set-up:
Tell your team the procedure for the Share and Capture before diving in: that everyone should headline interesting quotes, observations, and curiosities –writing one per Post-it as the “story” (the recap of the empathy work) is told. If time is limited you likely will need to set up some boundaries (“Let’s start with the most compelling user we talked to . . .”) and may need to quicken the pace if the recounting is plodding. Show a couple examples of useful headlines that capture the intrigue with a limited number of words. The headlines can be straight observations or quotes—not necessarily synthesized yet—but should not be reduced to bland facts. For example: “Eats breakfast after arriving at work” or (quote) “‘Wheat germ freaks me out’” is better than “Late breakfasts” or “No wheat germ.” Encourage simple sketches to capture findings too.
Doing it:
Everyone gets a Post-it note pad and a Sharpie. Ask one person to start recounting an interview or observation, talking with level of detail you might use when telling a good story. This means digging into some of the intriguing details but not repeating every question and answer. The storytelling approach can be very useful even if everyone was present for the same empathy work. As the story is told, others should add their observations to enrich the unpacking. Have everyone capture useful information as headlines on Post-its.
Team members should also ask each other questions—particularly ‘why’ questions—as you talk through the experience. As a coach, you should model this – the conversations this generates often yield the a-ha moments. Whenever someone expresses a belief herself or projects a belief on the user, that is a good opportunity to ask yourselves ‘why’. (For example, “I think he really sees meals as a time to connect with people” – “Why do you think that is?”) The team should talk through answering two whys: why you believe what you are inferring (what did you see or hear that lead you to believe this?), and why your user feels this way (what are the deeper reasons, motivations, and worldviews that are behind the observation?). As a coach, you might have be the shovel to dig deeper--by asking questions—but push your teammates to tell you what’s down there.
Saturate and Group:
Once you unpack and visually capture your empathy work, you can physically move around the Post-its to consider patterns, outliers, connections, disconnects, and contradictions. Your team can either place post-its on the board as you unpack, or do it afterward. We recommend trying it afterward, so people can verbal announce the headlines as they put them up. Do this quickly, but one headline at a time while listening to each other. You can start creating groupings as you go by placing related headlines together. Continue to question the reasons for what you heard and observed. As an advanced design thinker, you have an intuition of potentially fruitful nuggets to dig into. Help your team by asking good questions when the opportunities come.
Continue to create groupings. It usually works for everyone to do it together, but if you have time, doing individually and multiple times can be powerful. Encourage all the team members to get up at the board, move the Post-its around, and participate in the conversation. The issues that come up (and that you stoke through questions) in trying to decide how to group elements should spark some productive spaces. How the team works in the physical space is important here – work on a large board area and in an arc of team members each within a step or two of the board. Avoid dominating the board or letting one teammate control the process. If you the team needs prompting, do so – for example, take two headlines and ask how they are related; then ask if there are any elements that relate to (or contradict) that theme. Continue from there.
Build to User Attribute, Needs, and Insights:
When you end up with groupings, ask what’s interesting—what’s a potential insight—about each group. Or consider outliers and disconnects. The reality is, in most cases, nuggets will have already surfaced during the unpacking work. Start with those and build more through considering your headlined findings. You are aiming uncover a bunch of meaningful nuggets synthesized from the mass of findings – and then use those to create needs and insights.
Teams often clam up when you try to move from the broad discussion to the concrete needs and insights. It is tough to capture complicated human emotion and behavior in a phrase; but is also important to distill your team’s findings down to bite-size chunks you can grab onto and work with. Take the pressure off by making lists of possibilities, rather than just the “good” or “interesting” user attributes, needs and insights. Use the board to your advantage – directing people to write headlines rather than continue a lengthy conversation. Create three lists: user attributes, needs, and insights. Do it on post-its or by writing directly on the whiteboard. Encourage specific, even narrow, statements – do not try to capture everything by making excessive broad statements. It can be useful to give a few minutes for team members to write down possibilities individually before coming back together as a team, sharing, and building on the lists.
Start with user attributes, because that this usually the easiest and frames the other two lists. List the important attributes of the user or users you spoke with – emotional components as well as demographic features (“stubbornly strong-willed” as well as “father of young children”). Make a list of dozens of attributes. Then move on to needs and insights. If you have limited time, it may help to first identify a user to concentrate on before creating the list of needs. There will likely be overlap between the three lists (e.g. it may be insightful to note that all our users who like concerts are single) – that’s okay, do what make sense and don’t worry too much about what fits onto what list.
You could also utilize why-how laddering at this point to help your team get to emotional needs or to uncover more actionable needs from abstract but meaningful ones. This could be a good teaching moment about abstraction.
You Know You Are Doing Well When . . .
Your team is exciting about the things they are talking about.
You feel like you are exploring, not deciding.
Common Pitfalls:
Headlining Categories Rather Than Capturing Meaning: The outcome of grouping findings can feel unsatisfying, and will be fruitless, if you oversimplify or generalize the group headlines. It doesn’t do much good to put a bunch of observations in a group and call it “health”--other than identifying a space to dig into. Instead build nuggets into grouping headlines. What about health? Users view health as a nuisance? Aspects of health—like diet and viruses—are entirely separated in user’s minds? Find what is interesting about the common elements, not a categorical word to bucket them in. The same is true of individual observation headlines – don’t oversimplify them.
Jumping to (and Clinging to) a Solution: Hearing what users say and synthesizing your findings is bound to spur some solution ideas. That’s great. The trouble is when your teammate won’t let it go. We encourage the use of a “Solutions Parking Lot” – a space on the board where you actually write down the ideas that come up so you don’t forget them, but that you can put them aside and focus on understanding your users at a deeper level first.