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how to...

INTERVIEW

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What is the aim?

The aim is to have a focused conversation with your primary user to fully understand their needs and wants in relation to your specific design brief. Your primary user is the person you will be consistently communicating with throughout so this initial interview is essential to understand:

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 - what problems/frustrations they may have

 - what they want

 - generally to understand them more

 - start to build a relationship with them

How to interview effectively

Watch this video as a first step. This is an interactive video and you will be asked to ask questions along the way. I'm afraid the sound is quite low so you will need to turn up the volume to hear it.

The main steps / tips as highlighted in this video are:

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  1. Write a short list of open questions to base your interview around

  2. Before you start consider how you will record it and make sure you get permission from your interviewee

  3. Give them a brief introduction to explain why you are interviewing them

  4. Don't rush and allow the interviewee to talk. (if they are talking a lot around the topic you are doing well)

  5. Avoid using leading questions 

  6. If the interview is not 'on topic' don't be afraid to bring in back by asking another questions / re-word it

  7. Thank them for their time

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We understand that is the current situation it may be more difficult than normal to meet your user but you could easily record your screen if you organise to do an interview over a video meeting of some description. Some services give you an option to record it directly, if not you could use add-ons, we would recommend 'Screencastify'.

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Below you will find some links to other websites that give further advice of interviewing users which you may find useful.

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How to use it?

You want to make sure you save your video (or audio file) into your video folder on drive. Once that is done you can embed it in your slides. You will then want to re-watch it and pull out the key findings into a list and document these on your slides. Finally, remember at any stage if you want to ask them more questions you can either 'meet' them again or communicate via email.

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