The GV research sprint: Schedule participants and draft interview guide (day 2)
Updated June 2021
At Google Ventures (GV), we have a four-day process for answering questions and testing assumptions without the time or expense of launching. We call it a GV research sprint. This is the third in a series of five articles on running your own research sprint. (You can also watch a 90-minute video about research sprints, or see GV’s Guide to UX Research for Startups.)
Research sprint checklist:
– Create a recruiting screener
– Post recruiting screener where the right people will see it
– Select and schedule participants
– Start creating interview guide
– Confirm participants
– Complete interview guide
– Review prototype with your team
– Set up test devices and recording system
– Interview five customers!
– Summarize findings and plan next steps with your team
Select and schedule participants
After 24 hours, you should have a good set of participants to choose from in your Google spreadsheet, User Interviews project, or wherever you chose to collect responses to your screener. Review each one, and use your recruiting criteria from Day 1 to highlight the best matches. When you encounter a response that’s way off the mark, you can hide it or label it so you won’t waste time looking at it later.
(If you used Google Forms, responses will be in a bona fide spreadsheet, so you can use filters, sorts, conditional formatting, and other features to automate this process.)
Once you’ve narrowed the list of potential participants, select the five candidates who fit your criteria. As a best practice, you can call them (yes, on the phone) to verify their screener responses, check that they’re sufficiently articulate, confirm their availability, and start establishing rapport. But with a good screener, you may not need to do this.
After the phone call, email them to confirm the time, date, and location of the interview. And include:
- If the research is in-person, any instructions that will help people arrive on time, such as directions, parking info, the nearest transit stop, and what to do when they arrive.
- Your phone number in case they have questions or need to reschedule.
- A link to a non-disclosure agreement that people can review and sign ahead of time. You can use DocuSign or HelloSign for online signatures, or else just attach a PDF. (In addition to confidentiality, this sample NDA gets permission to record and protects ownership of ideas).
To minimize frustrating no-shows, ask people to reply to confirm. Your email subject line could say: “Reply to Confirm — Usability session scheduled on May 10 at 1 pm.” Tools like Calendly can help streamline scheduling.
This might seem like a lot of back-and-forth just to schedule participants, but every response will boost your confidence that they’ll actually show up for the interview. You’re moving fast, and only doing five interviews, so you’ll want to make the most of your time.
Read more about how to minimize no-shows in the GV Library.
Start drafting interview guide
Now you can start planning what exactly you’re going to do during the interviews. You could wing it, but you’ll get much better results if you follow an interview guide. Why? With an interview guide you can:
- Think about how to phrase questions without “leading the witness.”
- Create a checklist for important details and topics during the interviews. (This helps you stay on track if there’s a technology snafu or if anything goes awry).
- Plan a time budget for each task or topic. This helps you keep interesting (but low-priority) conversations from taking up the whole interview.
Most interview guides consist of an introduction, context questions, tasks, follow-up questions, and debrief. Today you can start by writing the introduction and context questions. On Day 3, after the prototype is complete, you can complete the rest of the interview guide.
Part 1: Introduction
When an interview begins, the participant can be a little nervous and unsure about what to expect. The first part of the interview guide is intended to put them at ease, start establishing rapport, give them an idea of what you’ll be doing and what’s expected of them.
Start by saying something like this (with a big smile):
Thanks for coming in today! We’re constantly trying to improve our product, and getting your frank feedback is a really important part of that.
Before we start, thank you for signing the non-disclosure agreement. I’d like to emphasize two parts of that. First, it’s a reminder that what I show you and what we discuss here today are confidential. It also gets your permission for me to record our session, just for our own internal use. That way we can go back and review it later. And, of course, you’re free to take a break or leave at any time during the session.
I like to keep these sessions pretty informal. I’m just trying to learn from you today. I’ll ask a lot of questions, but there are no right or wrong answers.
[If I’m interviewing experts or professionals in an area, I will add, “I’m not an expert, so please be patient with me if I ask dumb questions.”]
I’ll start this session by asking some background questions. Then I’ll show you some things we’re working on, and ask you to do some tasks.
Do you have any questions before we begin?
Part 2: Context questions
Fight the urge to jump right to questions about the product or prototype you’re testing. It’s best to start by asking the participant some general, open-ended questions about their past experiences and current behavior. A little context about their life, habits, attitudes, and problems will help you better understand their reactions and feedback.
You can use personal details shared by the participant to personalize the scenario and tasks when you move on to testing the prototype.
And these initial questions are a great opportunity to build rapport. If you warm up with some easy questions, your participants will feel more comfortable giving you real reactions and honest feedback later in the interview.
When I interviewed potential users of FitStar, a mobile fitness app which has since been acquired by FitBit, I started with these context questions:
What kind of work do you do?
For how long have you been doing that?
What kinds of things do you like to do when you’re not working?
What do you do to take care of yourself? To stay in shape? To stay active?
Activities? Sports, exercise, classes? Other habits in your day?
Have you used any apps or websites or other programs to help you with fitness? Which ones?
What did you want them to do for you?
What do you like/dislike about them?
Did you pay for them? Why? Why not?
Who (e.g. friends, coaches, teachers?) helps keep you active?
How do they help you?
Do you share info about your workouts or your goals with anyone? When? Why? How?
What (if anything) do you do to keep track of what you’re doing?
How does that help you?
How have your exercise habits changed over time?
What did you used to do 6 months ago?
Software and tools you use?
If you had three wishes for things that would make you more efficient or more effective at getting or staying in shape, what would you wish for?
Let’s pretend that for the new year, you want to get more into shape.
Let’s start in the app store…
Please go ahead and try to find an app that you’d want to try? [think aloud]
What kinds of things do you look for or avoid?
Format?
Types of workouts?
Featured celebrities or personalities?
Company name?
What do you want to know about these apps before you’d try them?
As in the example above, it’s best to start broad, then move on to specific questions related to your goals for the research sprint. If you do it right, participants won’t even realize the interview has started — it will feel just like natural small talk.
Your interviews are only two days away! By now, you’ve selected participants and started writing your interview guide. On Day 3, you’ll finalize the schedule and wrap up your interview guide. Then you’re ready for showtime.
GV research sprint series
Previous: Start recruiting participants (day 1)
Next: Finalize schedule and complete interview guide (day 3)
