Ray Dalio, perhaps, very clearly explained the value of interviews and observations of clients in a live environment for entrepreneurs, product managers, designers and analysts in his book “Principles”. He shares interesting nuances of how methods saturate digital indicators, bringing turning points to understanding the picture around an idea/product. Let’s record the technique that once helped to start conducting interviews and still works well as a first practice.
How to Do Your First In-House UX Research Without Using a Research Agency
How do you find respondents? First of all, it is important to consider that respondents can be broadly divided into 2 groups – current users and potential clients. And then, point by point, you will need:
1. The desire to get something new. The point of this exercise is to take and build on your understanding of the subject, boldly challenge your existing opinion. Even if you are already closed off from this phrase or do not agree – let’s further understand what you are losing.
2. Recruiting tools for UX research. The market is already full of agencies for recruiting respondents and UX research tools that will recruit respondents for you, both in your product and from the B2C/B2B market. Some platforms, like Tonybet online betting, have demonstrated innovative ways of gathering insights from their users to enhance the overall experience.
3. Perks (truly valuable to the audience, not your team), not money per se. Perks reduce bias. If you don’t offer a perk, your sample will be biased towards people who have a lot of free time or who are here to work for money.
4. Phone. Or ideally something like join.me or Zoom so you can record the call and review it when needed. Video is not key. Better without it so you can focus on listening.
Day 1: Recruiting respondents
Start early so you can adjust your path to the goal during the day. You will need time to collect the necessary data.
Create your screener. Offer a bonus (that your customers value, or just a gift card to a well-known online store, tickets to a conference – this is an opportunity for experimentation). Questions in your questionnaire should include age range, location, email address. Next, to find the necessary respondents, you need to identify just one question – this question should be closest to the purpose of your study:
How often do you shop online?
How often do you eat out?
How many children under 12 do you have?
How often do you organize events?
How often do you conduct competency assessments?
How often do you book accommodation?
As much as you would like to. (Never ask a closed question, one that can be answered simply “yes” / “no” for the sake of it.) And no more than 5 questions!
The sole purpose of a screener is to gather people to talk to. A pre-screening survey by itself is not user research. For example, Ethnio has instructions and examples for setting up a screener. Include a cut-off date of “today.”
Then ask everyone you know to share the link to the survey.
If you have a decent amount of traffic to your site or have a mature product, you can make a pop-up with javascript. This will only attract people who know your site exists or use the product or specific features, so keep that in mind.
You can do live recruiting (if you have a sufficient hourly load of active users on your site/app) and invite people to talk right away. On your calendar, block out 15 20-minute slots with at least 10 minutes between them. This gives you 2 sessions per hour with some wiggle room to reschedule and deal with no-shows. You can connect Calendly to Zoom and it’s super easy.
Once you have 40 responses, select 20 to email and schedule a time to talk the next day. This method will help you get about 10 candidates to interview. Aim for a broad distribution of age, gender, and geography.
If you are targeting people of a certain age or location, or maybe users of certain features, keep the list to just those.
At least two people on your team should be involved in screening fresh respondents to eliminate as much sampling bias as possible. Don’t worry, act quickly and try to get as much useful information about the people you are looking for (use criteria to evaluate whether they are a good fit or not).
Preparing a call list and putting together a call schedule can take you a day and a half. Sometimes a little longer.
Day 2: Interviews
Put all the interviews on a calendar. Ask someone to help with notes, and start calling respondents.
Your interview script is simple:
Tell me about how you spent your time yesterday. And then tell me about what’s bothering you.
That’s it. Make this one request. Listen actively for about 15 minutes. That’s it, you’re already taking your first steps in online ethnography (well, not by academic standards yet, but rather by the standard of “studying people in their social context” – for example, like adding Mentos to Diet Coke – it’s like studying chemistry in a game-like, practical format – the phenomenon has been created, the reaction has begun, which means you can start taking into account more nuances and improving the methodology, gradually building up more and more precise methods).
OK. In fact, to ask such a question, you will still need a little preparation. Get ready to get acquainted and be prepared to show genuine interest.
— Hi, my name is [name]. I work at [company] and conduct research to help improve our products and processes by connecting with customers. The research is scheduled to take no more than 20 minutes.
If you don’t mind, we are recording this call for notes only. The recording will not be published or shared outside of our team. [Optional 30-second conversation about the weather and/or sports]
— Now, please tell me about your day yesterday. [Really, just listen now and don’t interrupt. This can be really tough.]
— [You can also, if possible, prompt for more details by asking, “Please tell me more about that.” “What device are you using?” or asking a follow-up question, “What prompted you to do that?” If there’s a gap in the conversation, wait a few minutes. The participant will usually fill in the details later. Don’t interrupt clients, but keep an eye on the situation (so it doesn’t suddenly get carried away) ]
– Is there anything that might be holding you back in your work with the product?
– Is there anything else that should be written down before we wrap this up?
– Thank you very much for your time. Your input was very helpful. Can I send you a link to receive the bonus to your email [email address]? Please expect it within the next 24 hours.
– Send gift cards or other bonuses in a set at the end of the working day. It will take 10 minutes.
If you approach these questions honestly and with integrity, the discussion will be very instructive. In the highly unlikely event that you don’t learn anything new or useful, continue to study customers or recruit respondents from other segments.