Empathy interviews are the cornerstone of Design Thinking. Through ethnographic research techniques like In-Depth Interviews (IDI) we can learn how different customers feel about the problem we are trying to solve and how they might fix it if they could.
During an empathy interview, there is a moderator (question-asker) and a note-taker. These interviews are usually conducted one by one for 30 minutes to an hour in-person, over the phone or video chat. In-person is best, as it allows us to see the customer’s reaction, body language, and hear their tone of voice, their excitement and their frustration. By asking lots of open-ended questions and doing far more listening than talking, we learn valuable insights from real customers to take back to the team for a truly informed brainstorm session.
How many people do I need to interview?
You will need at least 5 customers for patterns to emerge, but there’s a bit more to it than just finding five folks to chat with. Here are a handful of pro tips when recruiting:
- As a default, we highly recommend scheduling 7 customers, so that, should anyone cancel or not show up, you at least have 5 data points to work with.
- A typical interview block schedule happens over the course of 1 day. We typically…
