[MUSIC] Welcome back. Primary research will be the hardest part of your work. It's very labor intensive, it's also really valuable in the data that you will gain from talking and interacting with the people who will be using your product in the future. With planning interviews, getting the right mix of people to interview is important to the success of your overall project. Spend time planning out who you need to interview and don't just take the first five people to sign up. The problem with that of course is that they might all have the same perspective. So you need differentiation between the people you're interviewing. You also want to start by scheduling interviews very early on in your project. This can take a lot of time to do specifically when working with healthcare technology. As you may know, a lot of healthcare professionals, patients and others who are involved with health care in general are very busy. They don't have a lot of time that they can contribute. You might be able to get 30 minutes scheduled with them which is great, or you could even get an hour if they're really interested. But even if you get 15 minutes to talk directly with potential users, it's valuable. You can meet them where they are and be flexible with your schedule. Find a way to be able to talk to your users directly, no surveys here. In this world, we can do interviews directly over Zoom, it's preferable though to also see screens and people, so one on one in person is a little bit better. How many interviews you should do is a question that I get asked often. The rule I like to use is diminishing returns. So if you feel like doing one additional interview is yielding very, very, very little new information. You're probably done doing interviews. All that said, it's hard to get a complete picture if you are developing a really complex application if you only interview less than 15 people for a widely used product. When planning interviews, don't be afraid to pose the question about interviewing like you're asking for help. People really like to be invested in the design process early and they like to know someone is looking to learn and listen about their problems. So here are some interviewing tips. These may be similar to going for a job interview. Just like the job interview, you want to do your research on the person and their role before showing up to talk to them. You want to ask to meet them in a place where they may actually use the application. It is really important so you can see the environment around them and what it's like to actually use the application in that space. Is it loud? Is it crowded? You want to build a report with them and get to know them and be gracious from the start, this is where building empathy starts. So instead of diving into tactical questions about the applications start by getting to know the person you're talking to. And having a question plan is really important. You can start with somewhere between seven and 10 questions for a 30 minute interview. Know that you're not going to get to all of them, so put the most important questions toward the top and be flexible and also be ready to throw in new questions if you have time. A little note on recording, it's definitely advisable to record sessions if possible. Always tell others that you're about to record them, and if they're not comfortable with that, that's okay. You can still take really good notes and get good information from your interview. When framing questions, always ask why or tell me more in your questions, especially if the answers are tending toward the shorter side or you're getting one word answers. Avoid any leading questions, answers to yes/no questions are generally not very useful to this research. Don't assume anything about the people you're interviewing and give them time to respond. So here are some sample interview questions. You don't have to use these, these are just some ideas and you really need to design them for your product and what you need to know. Notice though that we start by asking questions about who they are, getting to know them a little bit more, and after that, don't be afraid to just jump into asking about their problems. People love to talk about their problems that they experience, so give them that opportunity. You can also ask them what solutions they thought for their problems. You'll find some really interesting and creative things that you might be able to apply to your designs. Understand what is important and impactful for them when it comes to their problems. This is important because if you have a lot of things that you come away with to address, you need to be able to prioritize them later. Your final two questions should always be, what else should I be asking you? And who else should I be talking to? What else do you want to tell me is a great question because you actually end up getting really important information right at the end of the interview. And they'll think and rack their brain about, is something that they haven't addressed yet. So it's important to talk about observation when we're looking at primary research. Interviewing is great, you get a lot of good data from that, but if you can't notice what they do, you're missing a piece of the picture. If possible, while asking questions you should ask the user to show you what they're talking about. Specifically with healthcare software, you need to see what they're actually talking about. To demonstrate the importance of the difference between what people say and what they do, I'll tell you a little bit of a story about how conference calls were evaluated at an organization. In this story, a design team went into an organization and was evaluating efficiency and asked them to show them how they do their conference calls. They asked how well do the conference calls go? And the administrative professional said, yeah, conference calls goes well. The design team then said, okay, well show me how you do a conference call. This was decades ago, so they picked up one rotary phone and dialed the number and got someone on the line and then the administrative professional put them on hold. Then they picked up another phone nearby, dialed, someone got them on the line, put them on hold and then once they were both on hold, they took them off hold and put the two phone receivers together then let them talk. While you can see that to him that might have been a successful conference call, especially back then, it wasn't actually a successful call. There could have been audio issues, the lines could have been cutting out and it required a person to stand there and hold the two phones together. By observing in addition to interviewing, they realized, hey, we can really help them in improving their efficiency. You do need to look beneath the surface. Another thing you can ask to do a shadow, it's an effective way to gain more context with shadowing, especially in healthcare. You have to figure out a way you can be there in their space and watch what they're doing without being in the way. You can talk to them ahead of time about where you can stand or sit, potentially. And you should build in some time with shadowing to ask questions. Before you shadow, you could go and ask some questions just to gain some context about what you're about to see. So I hope you enjoyed learning about primary research. Are you ready to do some interviews?
