User Research Interview Guide

Issue Expert/Participating Organization Interviews - User Study Interview Guide

This guide was composed by volunteers at the Abortion Access Hackathon and is intended to be a starting place for empowering your User Experience volunteers to come up with their own process based on their own experiences. We hope this guide fosters productive discussion on the questions and approaches that best fit your issue area experts and organizers.

Overall objective

Get information from issue experts and organizations on: their intended process for conducting their work, their actual process in conducting their work, what the experience of their work is like, how it affects who and how many they can serve etc.

The goal is to identify problems/opportunities for the hackathon participants to provide solutions which can make all of the above easier.

Example: Many orgs are tasked with arranging volunteers to help with transport, housing for a client. This tends to be time-consuming for fund organizers. How can we help?

This will be especially important to get a primary source for our teams to use so that they know how this experience of conducting this area of work can vary wildly from state to state based on laws, geography, and demographics.

How we will use this guide

We’ll use this guide as a method to conduct user interviews with subject matter experts, participating organizations, and ideally those they serve.

For more info on conducting user interviews, check out these resources:

Feel free to add more resources here!

Methodology

  • Up to 60 minutes in length

    • Minimum 30 minutes if participants have limited time

  • Each session has three roles:

    • Participant (1 or more members from organizations, providers, etc.)

    • Notetaker (silent, “transcribing” answers as much as possible, debrief afterwards)

    • Interviewer (ask primary questions and probing with secondary questions, etc. as needed, guide the conversation, debrief afterwards)

Interview Questions

Please don’t be shy! List any questions you think will help us understand the challenges and opportunities that stakeholders face. We’ll work together to pare down and edit this list, and format it so that it can be easily used for interviews, emails, or online surveys.

Organizational/stakeholder research questions

These will help us prioritize problems to solve for movement organizations. Which solutions might provide the highest value to the organization?

  • What is your organization’s mission, or highest goal?

  • How does your organization define, or measure its success?

  • Who are your patients/clients? What demographic or other characteristic information do you know about them?

  • As you try to reach your organizational goals, what are the challenges you’re facing?

    • Does your organization have the capacity to address these challenges?

      • If so, what are you currently doing to address those challenges?

      • If not, please describe the limitations that prevent you from addressing these issues.

    • What has worked so far? What hasn’t?

  • Briefly describe: the key roles in your organization, and how they work together.

    • Are there any challenges these role face within their own specific workflows, or in workflows with each other?

Financial Questions

This could be a subset from above..

  • Who/what are your primary sources of funding?

    • What mechanisms do you use for development? (i.e. Networkforgood, Salesforce, events, raffles, Paypal, ..)

    • Do you have untapped resources in mind but not the means to reach?

      • Such are running large crowdfunding campaigns, or community benefit drives.

  • How much time is dedicated to fundraising/grant-writing etc?

    • What mechanisms do you use for development? (i.e. Networkforgood, Salesforce, events, raffles, Paypal, ..)

    • Who does the development work? Is this their primary responsibility?

    • What areas could be automated?

Subject-matter Expert interviews:

These are meant to help us get an informed view of the space, dig into questions we have about any secondary research we’ve done.

  • What motivated you to do what you do now?

    • This question may elucidate what they think is the absolutely most pressing problem to solve, in an anecdotal way.

  • Who are the types of patients or cases you tend to see? (geography specific)

  • What are the biggest challenges you face in your profession today? (geography specific)

    • What are the biggest barriers in access for your patients? (P) (geography specific)

  • What is the one big thing that you would want someone to walk away understanding about the services you provide?

    • What is the most common thing you hear from your patients / clients?

  • What do you envision for the future of the work you do?

  • How do you feel about your role in the larger movement?

  • If you had the ability to pause time for a whole month and have your team work on something that would make your work better/easier, what would that be?

    • What big, blue sky ideas have you had in this space? If we could do anything for this space without any constraints (budget, resources), what do you think of?

  • What policies prevent you or your patients from accessing the care they seek?

  • What policy work would you prioritize at this time?

    • How can the public better support policy change?

User research questions

Questions for intended end-users or beneficiaries of a particular solution.

Please take a look at all the questions listed here, so you have a sense for what you can talk about in your interviews.

Introduction / Workflows

  • What is your role and your day-to-day responsibilities?

  • What parts of your job do you wish you could spend more time doing? What parts of your job do you wish you could spend less time doing?

    • At what stage in an individual’s experience of this issue does your organization involve itself? Where does your specific role fit in?

  • Who are your typical clients, or who usually benefits from your services?

  • What does the intake/onboarding process look like?

    • How do new clients find you? E.g., online searches, word of mouth, advertising.

    • What kind of information do you need to collect from clients before providing service? (How do you determine if they’re eligible?)

    • What kind of communication is needed to guide the client through the process?

  • What are some problems you encounter in your daily work?

    • What are challenges that arise in getting funding or other services?

  • How do you track impact of the services that you provide?

Privacy

  • How do you protect the privacy of your clients and volunteers today? (P, F)

  • What concerns, if any, do you have for your security, privacy, and overall personal safety?

Tools + Resources

  • What tools and resources do those you serve use? What tools and resources does the staff use to help your audience? What tools and resources do you use in your daily work?

    • To the best of your knowledge, how well are these resources you use helping these audiences?

    • Do you have concerns about any of these current tools and resources?

    • What technologies and software platforms are your staff/volunteers comfortable using?

    • What kind of hardware? Phones, computers, tablets, PC or Mac, etc..

    • How much do you currently spend on software and other tech per month?

Volunteers

  • What kind of volunteers do you seek?

    • How many volunteers do you work with?

    • What are the main areas they provide support in?

    • What kind of communication is needed to connect volunteers with those seeking your services or support?

    • What are some problems you encounter in the process of coordinating and managing volunteers?

  • How easy is it for you to recruit for volunteers, or to organize the work they do?

    • How do new volunteers find you?

    • How do you determine if volunteers are eligible, what is the screening/onboarding process?

    • What kind of communication is needed to get them volunteer training?

    • What are some problems you encounter in the process of getting volunteers trained?

Direct, leading questions

  • What keeps you from helping more people? Eg facility space, human resources, funding, lack of demand (P, F)

  • What do you think are potential difficulties that might arise during our work, if any, based on your experience in this space?

  • Do you have an opinion of what should be available right away and what should be added later? What might be developed over time?

Meta (about the hackathon)

  • Are there any other people we should be talking to or information we should be reviewing?

  • Are you aware of any initiatives that have done similar work to us? If so, how have they fared?

  • Are you aware of any constraints that we need to consider? This could include patient privacy, technology restrictions, government policy, etc.

  • What is your definition of success in your work?

  • What are the top 2-3 things that we can do that would make this a success in your eyes?

  • Any thoughts, advice, or suggestions?

Interview Script

Intro

Today I would like to learn more about your experience in this area of [ISSUE AREA] work. The participants of our hackathon come from all walks of life and my pre-hackathon work-group’s aim is to arm them with the most direct, up-to-date, and accurate information from people like you. Your experience in this work is crucial for us to make certain that we understand the issues as you know them best.

The questions are to better inform us and the participants about your experience and expertise, so that the hackathon members can try to come up with the most relevant tools and solutions possible. Some of these questions might not appear to be related directly to the project, but I ask them in order to get a fuller picture of the space. It shouldn’t take us more than [insert time length] to get through all of them. Sound good?

[Great.]

If you need clarification on any of the questions I am asking, or if you feel that a question doesn’t apply to your situation, let me know. If you don’t have an answer or opinion, that’s ok too. Depending on your answer, I might ask you to expand on what you said. I might also repeat what you said to make sure I heard you correctly. If you need to go at any point during the interview, let me know that as well and we can try to schedule a follow up. Do you have any questions?

Questions

  1. Begin with

    1. Introduction / Workflows section

  2. If stakeholder / organization, ask those

  3. If provider, ask those

  4. As indicated (whether directly or indirectly) by the interviewee,

    1. Tools / Resources

    2. Volunteers

    3. Privacy

  5. If these questions have not been answered, proceed with

    1. Direct leading questions

  6. Wrap up with

    1. Meta / hackathon questions

Wrap Up

Thank you for taking the time to chat with us! Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions, or if anything else comes up.

PreviousSupplies Checklist

Last updated