Feature

Okay, so you've figured out who you need to interview to help develop ideas for product design.  What now?  Where do you go?  What do you ask?  And how do you get the most useful results?  Tom Bonnell, Director of Industrial Design at Respironics, and Julie Gulick, Product Planner at MEDRAD, have been conducting field interviews for years.  Contacted separately, the two offered insights which included strikingly similar recommendations.

By Melissa Appel, Contributing Writer 

Say your company is thinking about making a product for people who work at a specific type of job, or maybe that your company is already into that market.  How do you find out what really matters to the people who use it so you can capture their insight in your next product release?  Tom Bonnell of Respironics and Julie Gulick of MEDRAD both work for companies serving the health care industry, designing and planning for new products as well as product upgrades.  And what both have found, over years of practice, is that conducting interviews in tandem with contextual observation of users is a great way to develop rich information.  Watching how people do their jobs can reveal a lot more than asking questions alone.

Bonnell strongly prefers to conduct interviews in the context of where the product will be used.  For one thing, keeping the interview in context helps people tell their stories.  He points out that "interviewing in context gives visual cues for people to use - essentially memory aids.  I can either describe something from memory and give you a bunch of information, or I can have that information in front of me so each of us can point to things.  But sometimes insights are more about what's not being said," he observed. Unbiased observers can find insights that are often missed by those more familiar with the situation.

In context

There are some situations where you can not interview a person while he or she is doing the task you want to know about because questioning him or her would disrupt that task.   Sleeping is a good example, especially for Respironics whose products include devices for people with sleep disorders.  Instead, Bonnell suggests bringing as much context as possible into the interview. "Go to their home and if you are comfortable and have a good rapport, ask if you could go into their bedroom and say ‘Show me your process of getting ready for bed.  What do you do when you wake up?'  And if you don't feel comfortable going that far, you can use homework: let's do a diary, let's take pictures of things, let's bring them out and let's talk about them."

Gulick also combines interviews with observations to get more valuable information than through interviews alone. "You have to understand the context of the product that you're going to be developing," she said.  She suggests combining interviews with observation by building both into a site visit. "When we go into a site, we set up interviewing appointments ahead of time.  In general, we'll say ‘we want to come in and do some interviewing but we also want to watch how you do your work.'"

Build rapport

To secure the richest information, Gulick finds it best to first build credibility and rapport with interview subjects.  So when she goes to a site visit, she typically observes in the morning and interviews in the afternoon. "In the morning, you educate yourself about what they're doing as much as you can.  Then in the afternoon, when you sit down, it's much more casual and relaxed.  People are going to share more with you.  It's amazing the number of times people have told me, ‘Don't tell my boss this, but...' Then they'll tell you that they're changing jobs, or they'll tell you the dirt going on in the department."

Bonnell agrees that building rapport is a critical part of interviewing, perhaps even more important than the questions themselves. "It's more of a process of getting people comfortable with talking and sharing and showing you stuff and stepping you through the process," he said.

So what questions should you ask in an interview?  According to Bonnell, "you ask questions that allow people to talk."  And in order to make people comfortable, he suggests giving them homework.  "Homework, such as diaries, are really good tools to get people comfortable." They get people thinking about the topic ahead of time so that they become more comfortable sharing during the interview.  He also suggests showing them pictures or giving them words at the interview to make it easier for them to start talking.

Asking the Questions Right

"It's about how you ask," Gulick said.  "It's more about listening and less about asking.  You have to learn how to listen, how to let them talk.  It's not about you - it's all about them.  Allow them to tell you about whatever it is that they do." 

Sometimes people will answer in the form of a list: A, B, C, etc.  When that happens, Gulick suggests following up on each item in the list. "Take some quick notes of their list and then go back through that list and say ‘You said A; tell me more about A.'  And then: ‘give me a specific example of when A was an issue, or when A wasn't an issue.'  These specific examples will really help you understand what they're talking about."

Gulick also suggests asking questions even if you think you already know the answer. "Sometimes you know the answer for Joe or Jane in this part of the country or in this part of the world, but you don't know the answer for Pete or Mary over in another part of the country.  So curiosity is going to be your best advocate."

And what questions should you avoid?  Bonnell says to avoid leading questions, and questions that make suggestions or judgments.  He says to ask questions that offer both positive and negative options. "Ask them an either/or question like: ‘do you think that was a good experience or a bad experience?' If you just say ‘was that a bad experience?' they focus on the negative.  So if you give them a choice between the two, you're not leading them."

Gulick advocates avoiding closed-ended questions.  She offers the following example: "‘Is there anything wrong with your job?' ‘Nope' ‘Is there anything you would change about your job?' ‘Nope'.  Instead, she says, ask them an open-ended question: "Say ‘what if I handed you a magic wand?  What would you do?' And they'll say ‘oh, well in that case, let me tell you...'  It just seems to open them up a little more."

Know When the Interview is Over

Once you are actually interviewing someone, how do you know when the interview is over?  Bonnell acknowledges that each interview is different.  On the one hand, you need to allow people time to think.  "As an interviewer, you have to be comfortable with dead air. You want to allow people time to think, almost to the point where it's uncomfortable."  At the same time, you don't want people to feel too uncomfortable.  "You have to look out for when the person gets fidgety to decide whether they're done or not," he said.

Bonnell also notes that some people talk longer than others, and that's okay.  "You need to be able to take little excursions with them, if they want to delve into something else.  Because that's where you can really discover things.  You don't want to cut them off.  And some people are really succinct.  But if you keep asking, you can take it deeper and deeper.  It really depends on the individual."  But sometimes you can't take an interview any farther and you need to know when to cut it off.

Gulick offers her own examples of when an interview is over.  "There are different ways that it's over," she said.  "If the person gets called out, it's over.  If they get bored; wrap it up and get done.  If you're clashing with them and it's stressful, try to calm it down by dropping that question and moving onto something else.  But if it's just not productive, it's over.  At the same time, sometimes people just run out of ideas; they've told you everything they can tell you, and then you know it's over."

Have a Plan

Bonnell warns that talking to just a few people won't give you the complete story.  "Often people will go out and do one or two interviews and think that tells them the whole story.  They'll sell their company on it, but it's not reality, it's not really what's happening, it's not capturing the richness of what's happening out there.  So on the one hand, everyone should go out and talk to people.  But on the other hand, be careful; don't bank everything on it.  There is a lot of value in hiring people who know how to do this really well, who can give you some deep rich information that is robust in its design and in how it's conducted."

Gulick agrees. "You need to have a plan of what you're going to do with that information.  If you go out and interview just to say that you've interviewed, you might learn a few things, or you might learn a lot.  But if you don't know what to do with that information once you come back, if you don't have some sort of a process or method to implement it, then think again.  Put a plan together.  That will help you a lot."

Since interviews are costly in both time and money, Gulick suggests using other methods if all you need are simple answers.  "If you have easy-to-answer, closed-ended questions, use a survey," she advises.  "If you are looking for very broad things where you're really delving in, where you have very high-level questions, where you want the customer to lead you somewhere, an interview is what you want to use."

If you have never conducted an interview before, Bonnell suggests practicing.  "Practice at home, practice with a colleague.  Go to the grocery store and observe people.  Talk to them about something.  Practice techniques of asking questions that don't lead, that prompt discussion, that don't make suggestions, that are open ended."  

There is no one right way to approach an interview, he adds.  "Everybody's a little different.  Some people are more comfortable talking with people and some people are kind of reserved.  If you're the type of person who likes to sit back and observe, use that to your advantage.  Maybe you can partner with someone who's more gregarious and likes to talk with people.  You can be the person who's observing what's going on and how people are answering questions.  And there's value in both techniques," he said.

Bonnell and Gulick concur that interviewing requires good technique as well as a sense of empathy with the people being interviewed.  Asking the right questions, in the right way, and in the right context will give more depth to the interview data.  And having a good plan will help produce worthwhile data and valuable insights from which to create meaningful products and services.

Melissa Appel is a contributing writer for Inside Product Strategy™ and a product designer specializing in research and strategy. She has a multidisciplinary background, including engineering, industrial design, and marketing, and has been working in various areas of product development in a variety of industries, including medical, ergonomic, sporting, electronic, and culinary products. She has a masters degree in product development from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering from The Cooper Union in NYC.

Ms. Appel can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .