Talking with Users

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From the course by University of Virginia

Running Product Design Sprints

396 ratings

University of Virginia

Running Product Design Sprints

396 ratings

Course 2 of 5 in the Specialization Agile Development

Typically, clients and managers don't want to pay for design (or strategy) -- they want ‘results’! Too often, this leads to solutions that just don’t make sense and aren’t valuable to anyone. Design sprints allow you to meet client's desire for quick, specific outcomes while making time to do things right. In this course, you’ll learn how to plan and run situation-appropriate sprints to avoid waste and deliver value sooner. We'll show you how to: - Plan, sell, and conduct design sprints that deliver valuable, actionable insights - Go out and learn who your customer really is and what’s important to them - Test your value propositions before you invest in building solutions - Test your user interface design to make sure it’s really usable - Focus and drive to actionable conclusions on questions of approach and architecture As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 25 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.

From the lesson

Testing Problem Scenarios in Design Sprints

Even if we deliver the perfectly built solution (on time, on budget, beautifully designed), if it solves a problem that doesn’t exist, we've failed. You can avoid poor outcomes with a very moderate time commitment. In this module, you’ll learn how to plan and manage a one-week design sprint to find out what really matters to your customer (or user).

Getting People to Interview7:10

Setting Up Interviews6:09

Talking with Users4:51

Preparing for Problem Scenario Sprints5:39

Meet the Instructors

Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow
Darden School of Business

In this video, we're going to talk about interviewing subjects.

Here's a checklist of things to make sure you're prepared.

The first thing is you want to make sure you've got those screened subjects.

That's what we've been talking about.

Then you want to have the interview guide.

We talked about how to prepare that in Course One.

Now, next, you want to make sure you have an intro script.

You think, probably, you'll remember to tell them all these various things, but

you probably won't.

Here you want to thank them, explain what the research is about,

explain to them that you're not there to judge them or evaluate them.

You're just trying to learn about whatever it is you're learning about.

Remember, if there's a question about confidentiality about what you're doing,

you probably don't even really need to get in that with them, in fact, you shouldn't.

Remember, we've talked about how the yellow Walkman problem, you don't

want to put the solution in front of them, you just want to talk about the problem.

Then you want to explain how their information will be used and

you also want to make sure that you're clear with them about the compensation,

how that would work.

And if you need paperwork, like a release or something,

you want to have that obviously prepared and ready to go.

If you're not using their names, or recording them, or using any of

this material in a public way, you may find that you don't need a release, but

that is going to depend on who your subjects are or what geography you're in,

a bunch of other things that you should check about.

You want to have your notes and

recording ready and this may involve a couple of things.

One, there is a form to take notes on in appendix A of the Google Doc.

It says notes for field interviews, I think.

I like to have a few of those tables copied out and ready to go, so

I'm not fiddling with it in front of the subject.

Personally, I like to take notes on my computer.

It's a little awkward but most of the subjects really don't mind about it.

You can also, if you have someone else that'll come with you to take notes,

that's great.

It allows you to be much more focused on what's going on with the interview.

You can also record, as long as you have their agreement, and that can work, but

you may find that you have trouble finding the time to go back and

listen to that whole recording again and transcribe it.

Personally, I like to just sit there and I try to take pretty detailed notes.

I'm a not fantastic but relatively fast typer so that that works, so you'll

find what works for you but make sure you have whatever it is ready in advance.

If you're going to do the day in the life followup, which involves getting

photos back from them, you want to make sure you have that squared away and

squared away with regard to your paperwork.

Just as a reminder, we're really focused on this part of our product or

feature hypothesis, we're trying to learn these specific things.

The reason why I'm making this distinction is we're going to look

at the value hypothesis when we go to the motivation sprint but

if we bleed any of that material into this activity,

we're going to end up with the yellow Walkman problem, if you remember that.

The punchline of that story was, we ask people if they like our hypothetical

product, they're going to say yes.

And not only that, but they're going to start telling us probably

what they think that we want to hear, which isn't what we want.

What we want to do is use a nice solid interview guide like this.

You learned how to do this in Course One and

we want to move from very general things,

very general questions, not leading to relatively more specific questions.

That's how we get a good interview,

that's how we get responses that have a high degree of evidentiary value.

If we ask a general question and we get a specific response that's

what you thought was our most important problem, that's very valuable to hear.

If we ask them a very specific question and

then they just say yes, then that's not very valuable to hear.

The most important thing is you're getting ready for

your sessions is to have this in order and to practice.

You probably should practice, at least, one, two, three of these

interviews yourself so that you can be a good coach to your team on how to do this.

In this video,

we looked at how to actually conduct these subject interview sessions.

Now if you've ever gone skiing or

surfing or maybe played tennis, I mean all these things feel kind of awkward and

maybe you don't like that the first few go arounds and that's natural.

But I would encourage you to try it a few times before you

make any kind of final conclusions about how hard it is or how you don't like it.

It is a very new type of skill but

I think it'll be really valuable to you in your career if you give it a little bit of

practice and bring home some valuable insights you can use for your project.

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