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Demo: Creating an Interview Guide Personas

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Agile Development in Practice (Project-centered Course)

University of Virginia

4.6 (96 ratings) | 4.6K Students Enrolled

Course 5 of 5 in the Agile Development Specialization

This project-centered course provides a guided opportunity for you to practice your agile development skills. Using the venture design process that frames the four courses in this Specialization, you will apply agile processes to a project of your choice or to a provided venture concept. From persona, problem scenario, and user story development to designing user testing and product launch, you’ll practice leading an agile project. You’ll finish the course with a portfolio-building design brief that demonstrates your learning and specialized skills in agile product development. To get the most out of this course, we suggest you first complete the other four courses in the Agile Development Specialization: Agile Meets Design Thinking; Running Product Design Sprints, Managing an Agile Team, Testing with Agile. By the end of this course, you'll be able to: --Formulate foundational positioning statements --Create, refine and test actionable personas --Conduct user interviews and analyze the results --Determine a 'happy path' to quickly test user stories --Run motivation and usability testing and evaluate the results As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 40 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122) This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

Skills You'll Learn

Product Development, Persona (User Experience), Agile Management, Agile Software Development, Design Thinking

Reviews

4.6 (96 ratings)

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SU

Apr 18, 2019

I had the interest in design thinking and Agile way of work, this Course has helped to sharpen my skills and learn Agile in a structure manner.

RB

Dec 07, 2017

Great project-centered course. Very demanding, but worth every drop of sweat.

From the lesson

Develop Personas and Problem Scenarios

Welcome to Week 2. This week you'll work on getting a baseline on your personas and discovery plan. Submit this by the end of the week to get (and give) feedback to help improve your final product. If you want to accelerate your learning, go ahead and get started on user interviews and set up a few Google AdWords.

Focusing Your Persona: Think, See, Feel, Do7:14

Designing User Stories: Problem Scenarios6:53

Demo: Creating an Interview Guide Personas7:13

Demo: Creating an Interview Guide Problem Scenarios4:45

Overview: Problem Scenario Sprint5:23

Using "Day in the Life" to Drive Empathy4:48

Taught By

Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow

In this video, we're going to learn how to start our interview guide.

And we're going to look specifically at the questions related to the persona

hypothesis.

As a reminder, this is a guide, not a questionnaire, so

it's to help you ask better questions of the subject, remember how you want to use

your time over the course of the time you have available.

And it's something you should freely iterate on and change.

We're going to want to start off with very general questions and by the way,

you should have started the subject interview or

not as the case maybe with your screening question.

So this is a simple factual question you'll ask the subjects to make sure that

they really do pertain back to your persona of interest.

In this case it was how many HVAC jobs have you done in the last month?

So the first the question we might ask here is pretty general.

Tell me about being an HVAC technician.

And then we might ask about the job.

What do you most, least like about it?

What about the job is hard, easy?

These are, again, just notes.

You're not going to be reading from this interview guide, presumably.

And then if we feel we're having trouble getting things from the subject we could

lead them a little bit with only at this point in the sequence with something,

I've heard such and such, does that apply to you?

Then we're going to ask about more specifically what their job is like?

What a day in the life is like for them?

While they're doing this HVAC repairs.

So we might ask something like, would you say you

have a specialty, a particular kind of job you do?

Within the HVAC context or we might ask something like,

tell me about the last job you did.

And as we discussed, this is something where they will probably say,

well I can think of this job last Tuesday, but it wasn't typical, that's okay.

You just want to get them to start driving to specifics at this point.

And supplemental questions you might want to ask to get the right level of detail on

that are things like, who else was involved?

The dispatch, the customer, these are things that are going to be pretty

important to us as we figure out how to develop software that standardizes and

automates the way these people work together.

And we might ask here,

what was hard, easy about that job?

Or we might ask them normative questions like,

what part of that job do you think could've done better?

Or, what would you've liked to have had?

Now we're getting into the think, see,

feel, do area, so with the think part, as you remember, we're getting

at the tension between how they see things now and how they would like them to be.

When we're trying to get at the tension between how things are and

how they should be, it's often easier to start with how they should ideally be.

How should things ideally be done?

And again hopefully we're doing this against the backdrop of a specific example

that we've been through sequentially together.

And then we can ask we can get at that tension by asking,

how are things done now?

How is that different?

With the see part of think, see, feel, do,

we're trying to get at what influences their point of view,

why did they think what they think is it a discussions with peers, things they read.

So we might ask them, how do you learn about what's new?

What's happening?

And then as we kind of want to get at which of their sources are most

influential, you might ask something like, who do you think is doing it best?

Who's career would you most like to emulate?

Then, when we get to the feel part,

we hopefully have a lot of specific examples to talk about at this point so

that we're not just asking them how do you feel when you do these jobs.

That probably won't work,

doing this against specific examples is probably the thing that's most effective.

So if we haven't already we want to get at a specific example here.

Tell me about the last time

you did a repair or maybe a certain thing happened.

If we think there are certain triggers that they relate to emotionally.

And then we would ask something like what motivates you?

What parts of the job are most rewarding?

Because we want to make sure that we get at what's exciting about the job

what motivates them, what demotivates them about the job.

When we get to the do part,

we want to get at the factual specifics that we care about.

So we might ask them how many jobs do you do a week?

How many hours is that?

How much time driving?

How much time.

Now, it bears mentioning here that these things are not individual.

You want to make sure that you know all this in the context of a holistic persona.

And as you actually interview the subjects it's really important to take

very very detailed notes for a couple of reasons.

One, if you feel like you have an answer on the do question,

well we already know how many jobs they do and so forth.

Well you may find that there's significant variation in the personas and you want to

look at the relationship between people that do a lot of jobs or relatively few

jobs in the other things that you heard from them, that's the first reason.

And probably the most important reason why you want to make sure you at least touch

on all these things on each interview and take really detailed notes is that

things that seemed not important to you at one point

may turn out to be really important as your perspective on the project evolves.

So this is how we would rough out these interview guides.

And again, just like a lot of the other things that we do,

we will iterate on these as we see what works for us.

In the next video, we're going to look at how to finish up the interview guide with

some questions that are more focused specifically on the problem scenarios.

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