Your first steps, of course, should be recruiting and scheduling your interviews. After that, though, you’ll need to begin your preparations by creating your agenda.

Sample Agenda

Each interview should have three people included:

• A participant - your customer or user
• A facilitator - to run the interview and field questions
• A note taker - to capture notes and insights

Here are a few tips for making the most of these interviews and to avoid coloring the data you receive from them:

1. Be objective - Your job is not to defend your product or instruct the participant on proper product use.
2. Be curious - Excavate the story. When a participant explains their rationale for a decision or an answer to a question, make sure to follow up with Who, What, When, Where, and Why questions to better understand the context.
3. Document everything (or as much as possible) - This is why recording the interview and having a note taker present is crucial. The data you collect in these interviews is priceless and will inform your hypotheses and experiments moving forward. Be thorough.
4. Ask for referrals - The participant might know a friend or colleague who is also a user of the product. Referrals are great ways to continue your interviewing and data collection.

Analyzing The Data