We all have our biases and as a result we quickly jump to conclusions totally forgetting that we are design a product and service for a group of users / customers. This tool will help you drive better conversations with your users so that you will understand their motivations, feelings, ambitions and real needs.

The way you plan and conduct the interviews will be fundamental to get the insights you need to create the products and services that will tackle the real needs of your customers. In a successful interview process you will need to immerse yourself in the customer shoes, observe the users and their behaviours in the contexts of their lives and engage with your users through schedules and "impromptu" encounters.

Who could use this

This framework should be used by anyone that is designing products and services that will impact any user that will be exposed to that product and service. Your customer / user could be external or internal and if you are aiming to tackle their jobs to be done this could be helpful.

Framework explanation

As we mentioned before to be able to achieve a successful interview we will need to immerse ourself in the customer shoes, observe the users and their behaviours in the contexts of their lives and engage with your users through schedules and "impromptu" encounters. We need, therefore to:

1. Plan for the interview and;
2. Execute the interview.

When planning the interview we need to understand what we want to learn, where to interview and to prepare a simple interview guide with open ended questions.

After the planning phase we will need to execute the interview and it is important to remember that any interview is just conversation that will have different stages:

• Introduction (yourself, the team and the project)
• Building rapport
• Evoke stories
• Explore emotions
• Questions statements
• Thank you & wrap-up
• Document & debrief

A List of useful questions to get you started

About lifestyle:

• Describe your family situation?
• If time and money were not an issue, how would you spend your day?
• Describe your typical day?
• What activities do you usually like doing? Why? What activities do your dislike?
• What do you enjoy doing most in your daily routine? Why?

Experience type questions:

• What is the best thing that has happened to you in the past week? month? year?
• What helps make an experience memorable for you?
• What experiences have you had that were challenging? What made them challenging?
• How would you describe things you like? What about activities that you enjoy? What make them enjoyable?
• How is your current lifestyle different from what you imagined it would be?
• Who would you like to spend more time with?

About attitude:

• If you won $1M, how would you spend it?
• In 10 years time what do you think your life will look like?
• How would you describe "fortunate"? What does it mean to you?
• In the next 5 years, what are your 3 biggest worries? How about your aspirations?
• What are the 3 most important things in life for you? Why?

Questions around values:

• What things in your life give you the most value? Why?
• How important is trust when you are making decisions?
• How do you define what value means to you? What makes things valuable to you?
• What are the elements which you think are most worth spending money on?
• Who or wha has the largest influence on you? why?
• Wha would you five up to help address a problem you are facing?

Please bear in mind that this questions are simple examples that would help us build rapport, evoke stories and explore emotions, however the questions will totally depend on what we are trying to achieve.