Recognizing your answers as assumptions, not as facts, is a great early step toward a successful lean user research study. By the end of your research, you will validate or most likely invalidate these assumptions, as well as have a clearer idea of who your users are.
If you feel that some of the questions are similar to one another, it is not a mistake. Asking the same question in different ways will help you exhaust all of your team’s assumptions about your users. Some of the things you and your team might have as objectives could be to find out more about the goals, tasks, pain points, behaviors, experiences, and attitudes (including concerns) that are important to each user group.
As you are answering the previous questions with your team, bullshitting your way into a persona or two becomes easy:
1 Draw a large rectangle and divide it into four (see Figure 2.4).
2 Give each part a title: [Persona name], Demographics, Problems, and Solutions (see Figure 2.5).
3 In the first part, sketch the face of the persona. Don’t worry about not creating a Da Vinci (see Figure 2.6).
4 In the second part, brainstorm and list a few bullet points to indicate some demographic data about the persona, such as age, occupation, marital status, kids, education, income, etc.
5 In the third part, brainstorm and list a few bullet points to indicate key problems you guess the persona has regarding the domain you are interested in.
6 In the fourth part, list a few ideas for features or products that will hopefully solve the persona’s problems you listed earlier (see Figure 2.7).
7 Repeat steps 1–6 for additional bullshit personas. You can potentially have as many as 12 personas, but don’t overdo it. A handful of personas is probably enough bullshitting at this point.
FIGURE 2.4 Rectangle divided into four.
FIGURE 2.5 BS persona template.
FIGURE 2.6 Not a Da Vinci.
FIGURE 2.7 Complete BS persona.
STEP 2: Decide who, how, and where to interview.
When product managers, developers, or designers think of interviewing, in most cases, they think of interviewing users or potential users in a quiet room or online through a video conversation of some sort. While there’s nothing wrong with those scenarios, there are some other options and types of interviews that will help you make a decision regarding what you want to do. Whom you invite to the party is going to define what kind of party you have, so choose carefully the people you want for these in-depth interviews.
Who?
These are the different people you can interview to learn about your users:
• User or potential user: This is the most common target audience for interviews. Based on assumptive criteria, you select current or potential users of a product or service and interview them. Choose this user to interview as the default or when you are not sure whom to interview.
• Limiting user: Someone who is least knowledgeable or able, so the team can consider what trade-offs might be necessary to make sure the limiting users can still use the product. For example, it might be someone who doesn’t normally use technology to solve problems, but would really benefit from it. Choose this user to interview when you feel or suspect your plans for the actual product are becoming too sophisticated and advanced.
• Extreme user: Someone with exceptional and extraordinary experience and knowledge about the product or domain. He is a user, but there are very few people like him. For example, if your users are business travelers, George Clooney in the movie Up in the Air (2009) is an extreme user. Or if your potential users are people who buy a pair of jeans once a year, an extreme user would be someone with 100 pairs of jeans in her closet who visits a jeans store once a week and knows a whole lot about jeans. Choose this user to interview because she exhibits behavior that’s shared by your core audience, but is more obviously observable as the extreme case.
• Expert: Someone who is extremely knowledgeable about the relevant domain, either because she has studied it, covered it for journalism purposes, or meaningfully invested in it (financially or mentally). For example, if you want to learn about the domain of personal weather stations, a potential user might be someone who is relatively interested in weather, while an extreme user is someone who actually has one or two personal weather stations, and an expert would be a meteorologist. To make the most of expert interviews, get familiar enough with this person’s expertise so the questions you ask are ones that you couldn’t find easily by educating yourself prior to the interview. Choose this interviewee when your domain expertise is really shallow and you want to ramp up quickly.
How and Where?
Now, let’s choose how and where to interview:
• In-person in a quiet room. This is the most recommended format for conducting an interview. Being there with a human being who is a user or potential user of your creation (or future creation) is the most humbling experience you’ll have during the development process. An even better setup would be to conduct the interview in person at a relevant place for your product or service idea. For example, if you have an idea for an app that helps people with their grocery shopping, try an in-person interview at your participants’ homes before and after actual grocery shopping, as well as during the store experience. You’ll get more rich input than you would imagine, such as people’s rituals, artifacts they own, and other people in the ecosystem that might affect your product (kids, spouse, etc.). The fact that it’s their domain and you are the guest will have people be more open to sharing things that they would never share otherwise.
• Street intercept. An interview format in which you grab passersby on the street and ask them a few questions. Two primary characteristics of street intercepts are 1) you must get out of your comfort zone and accept the fact that many people will refuse to be interviewed. 2) These interviews are not very deep and will only last 5 to 15 minutes. Many startups consider these “Starbucks” interviews as the primary technique for “Getting out of the building,” yet that’s not the case. Choose this type of interview when you want to collect specific quantitative data you cannot (or have difficulty) collecting otherwise. For example, if your product idea involves people who have no access to the Internet or smartphones, conduct street intercepts in areas where such people are more likely to walk.
• Remotely through video (through Skype, GoToMeeting, Hangout, etc.) or phone. A flavor of an interview in which the interviewer is not in the same location as the interviewee. It’s better to be there in person, yet in many cases, it’s much better to conduct a remote interview rather than to skip it completely and make product roadmap decisions based on guesswork.
The remaining steps refer to interviewing a product user