Confirm how you will use this information, and thank the participant for their time.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nAs stated previously, this interview guide is merely a guide. The interviewer should start with open-ended questions and then ask additional probing questions based on the participant\u2019s responses. Being genuine, honest and open about what you hear from the participants will increase their openness.<\/strong><\/p>\n5. Perform analysis and create customer insights.<\/h2>\n
Most researchers and designers alike will agree this is the most fun stage for a number of reasons:<\/p>\n
\n- They are learning new things all the time about their users<\/li>\n
- The shift in behavior based on technology advancements opens a lot of new opportunities<\/li>\n
- IDIs can reveal how wrong or misaligned an organization\u2019s knowledge about customer needs is internally<\/li>\n
- The data, while empirical, is hard to refute, helping to avoid bias and remove political landmines<\/li>\n
- Decisioning becomes faster, so the organization can move forward<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The hard part is that this step requires a fair amount of time to get all the notes from the interviews in order. Typically, you conduct interviews with two people: a facilitator and a scribe. Each must focus on their own role. For example, it is difficult for the facilitator to capture what interviewees say because they can lose focus and control of time without getting the depth of context they need.<\/strong><\/p>\nThe team will then need to gather all the raw information and concatenate what they heard and wrote down into categories or themes of information they can use to design solutions or inform strategic intent for a product or service. This theming of information is the starting point for how researchers and design teams make sense of what was said in aggregate. It\u2019s normal to have information fit easily into categories. If responses don\u2019t match a pattern, you can consider it fringe information and keep it \u2013 but not necessarily use it until a theme or pattern emerges.<\/p>\n
Once the analysis is complete, you need to take two steps:<\/p>\n
\n- Create a level of prioritization of the customer insights tied to the value chain of the organization. This helps you better understand the cause (if needed) and the initial impact of scope across the entity.<\/li>\n
- Create an action plan or recommendation for each insight that illustrates what you must do to improve the situation or create the best possible experience for your customer.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
This last step\u2019s outcome varies by organization and team. Typically, you will have a presentation that houses all the insights, suggests how you might use these, and helps guide stakeholders to the next step. You can often categorize customer insights into four main buckets:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- Things we need to act on now<\/li>\n
- Things we need to rethink<\/li>\n
- Things we need to watch and monitor<\/li>\n
- Things we do not need to act on.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
6. Host a read-out session and other meetings to discuss an action plan.<\/h2>\n
The last step in the process before ideating or solutioning is to ensure alignment with key stakeholders who you will directly or indirectly affect with any recommendation. You should also align action plans and recommendations to the research objective and demonstrate how it accomplishes a goal, removes a barrier or friction point, improves the customer experience and so on. You should be very clear about solutions in your plans while outlining any risks or challenges with your team\u2019s initial thinking.<\/p>\n
One of the biggest things to understand at this point is that one large group meeting is not enough \u2013 you need a read out. However, we recommend one-on-one meetings with key stakeholders to ensure they understand the \u201chow\u201d and \u201cwhy\u201d at a deeper level than just an executive summary.<\/strong> Get intimate with these leaders, so they can promote and sponsor the next phase of work as well as the next research assignment.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\n
Customer understanding includes a lot of what we all do every day, just with a different lens on how to define, act and ask questions with any external audience. Qualitative research like<\/strong> IDIs delivers a level of detail and customer understanding that helps you gain true empathy for your service or product users.<\/strong> But don\u2019t overthink it! Focus on ensuring you can effectively leverage your research and design experts, and empower them to create a repeatable process your organization can benefit from in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In this blog, we focus on effective qualitative research, specifically diving into the importance of the in-depth interview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":278,"featured_media":36082,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18139],"coauthors":[18119],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2024-07-21 20:45:54","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36055"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/278"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36055"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=36055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}