5 July 2021

Interview Guides

Went over interview guides for firmware and software and gave feedback
Iterate on them throughout this week
Joy He (Deactivated) will do interview with Ryan Dancy (firmware lead) this Thursday at 7:00pm
- Cannibalize questions from other interview guides for this one
- Rest of us will sit in, take notes, observe
Interview scheduled for Sunday July 11 at 1pm with Emma Wai (strategy lead)
- Riishi Jeevakumar will run this one, rest of us take notes

Don’t make assumptions about the current state/usage of the system
- You don’t know if they’re currently using telemetry, if they’ve done stuff in the past, etc
- Lead with an open-ended question such as “tell me about your experiences with [thing you want to ask about]” then go into the specific thing you want to investigate
- Or you’ll get a blank look and “we don’t use this” or “what thing?”
When trying to suss out usage patterns, lead with a “scenario-setting” question
- “What current tasks within MidSun involve data visualization? Tell me about them?”
- Then go into trying to suss out usage patterns, design patterns, current solutions
- Forcing people to think of specific scenarios/examples give you richer, more accurate, less speculative answers
Pay attention to wording: will the other person know what you’re trying to ask them about? Keep your wording specific.
Essentially, ask open-ended (“vague”) questions to find and establish specific tasks/situations/scenarios that are relevant to what you want to know about, then you can drill down

May be done in FigJam, Joy He (Deactivated) needs to investigate + set up
Will be done for all interviews
Based off of technical reqs and all data points outlined here https://uwmidsun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/S/pages/2760245765/can+dbc+Breakdown

Some stuff still needs to be clarified (tagged in red) ideally by this week
Give it a read to give you an idea of the data we’re dealing with, but no need to spend time on it

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One person acts as the “main interviewer” – they will be asking most of the questions and directing the interview
The rest of the people listen in on the interview (cameras off) and act as notetakers
- They are also expected to step in with any questions that they have, and help prompt the interviewer if they’re having trouble
- It’s good practice to record interviews and go over recordings after the fact. However, it’s very time-consuming and we have multiple people able to take notes – so I don’t want to do it.
  - I will save transcripts/recordings for reference, but we don’t want to fully go over all of them
  - Take good, detailed notes during the interview
  - Don’t do schoolwork/other stuff during the interviews lmao
It would be Very Cool if y’all were able to act as the “main interviewer” at least once
- Really good experience and helps differentiate you as a UX applicant, since most people never get the chance to do research with actual users
- HOWEVER, the interview guide must be well prepared/fully fleshed out (or I won’t let you do it :P)

I will screenshare one of the interview guides I created for co-op during Monday’s meeting (June 14).

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Notice that the sample has 5 main research questions/themes. These are your guiding questions that you are seeking to answer. They are BIG and ambiguous.
This weekend (June 12/13), try to come up with 5 big questions EACH that you want answered
- 5*4 = 20 questions total
- 10 for MSXIV dash (Rishii and Joy), 10 for MSXII dash (Cheryl and Catherine)
- As a team, we will discuss what questions we want to prioritize (ie if all of us came up with the same question, we likely want to include that question)
Next week, flesh out the sub-questions for the big questions/themes we agree on
- I will try to provide guidance on this if needed, or prompts to help you brainstorm
- I will also be re-splitting up the interview guides, because I feel that we may need different ones for each subteam using telemetry – let’s discuss Monday

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