Notes from Presentation on Interview Hacking

Great presentation by Travis McCutcheon of Leap for Mankind at the Lean User Experience Austin meetup titled Interview Hacking. Lots of good tips and a DIY work flow for interviewing. Here are my notes:

  • Experiments are the core of the Lean process.
  • Setup a pipeline of interviews. They take a lot of time to setup so always have some in queue.
  • Your first experiment will probably be a wash. Use it to make your second experiment more valuable. Use it to learn the user’s vocabulary and use in later experiments.
  • Scientific Method
    • Hypothesis
    • Preparation
    • Execution
    • Documentation
  • Always create a persona you are testing ageist. This will help find the proper people to interview. Include a picture, demographics, behaviors and goals.  At first the goals and behaviors are assumptions. Note this in the persona until you have proven them.
  • Interviewee scouting sources – LinkedIn, Meetups
  • Apps Used
    • Google Apps
    • Spreadsheet CRM
    • ToutApp
    • ScheduleOnce
  • Interview process
    • Write an interview script with questions targeting your assumptions
    • Create a Google Apps form that allows you to read the scripts, write your notes in the form field. All notes and data go directly into a Google Spreadsheet
    • Read the spreadsheet with full collection of interviewee statements grouped together to easily find patterns.
    • Update your persona with proven findings. Also use the persona to filter if an a piece of data is useful enough to record.
    • Repeat
  • Always ask the interviewee for referral to people in their network.
  • Book recommendation: Running Lean

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