Empathy interview
guide

The interview guide is a tool designed to guide you during your first interviews with the customer or end users to better understand the right problems to solve. It’s the starting point of your empathy journey. Highly recommended before jumping into ideation.

What is this for?

The interview guide is a tool designed to guide you during your first interviews with the customer or end users to better understand them from a behavioral point of view so we can identify the right problems to solve. Interviews are one of the techniques you can tap into to kick-off empathy research.

It’s considered to be a great starting point and the technique that faces the lowest threshold for teams who have never done empathy research before. Often we’re asked how many interviews is enough. Our rule of thumb: once you stopped gaining new learnings about your customers/ end users.

Step-by-step guide

Step 1

As a team, map out the questions you have for your customer/ end users (whoever is the target group of your challenge), your assumptions about their behavior and topics you’re curious to find out more about.

Step 2

For the assumptions and topics, you’re curious to find out more about, translate them into questions that are open-ended, invites user stories & allows the interviewee to share concrete personal experiences rather than just their opinions.

Step 3

If your project team has never done interviews before, make sure to dry-run it internally. It can be done either within the team or with other colleagues. Based on feedback, iterate in order to get to a flow you’re comfortable in conducting and at the same time exhaustive enough to learn more about your target group.

Step 4

Usually, we recommend doing interviews in pairs. One team member will be leading the interview, while the other one leads the note-taking. A recording is always an option if your interviewee consents to it. It helps during the unpacking after the interview.

Tip: for B2B customers, make sure you send out the invites for an interview early as it takes much longer to confirm interviews than with B2C customers.

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