Part 2 of my personal reflection on my experience diving into exploratory research. Art inspired by Nimura Daisuke

Exploratory research: part 2: conducting remote field research in the new normal.

Let’s face it, the pandemic is not gonna show itself out so soon. Work still has to be done, and in fact, there are more new opportunities created and left to be discovered since the start of COVID19. In part 2, I will focus on the nuances that helped to acheive a better experience while conducting remote interviews, from both interviewer and interviewee perspective.

Recap of part 1

In part 1 of my exploratory series, our final objective was to study the human experience of financial inclusion/exclusion, focusing in on the lives of the unbanked and underbanked of the working poor in Thailand and Indonesia during this pandemic, to ensure continued engagement in the financial system.

Because I am based in Singapore and due to the pandemic, we couldn’t travel to conduct in-field interviews. We weren’t native speakers of Bahasa nor Thai as well. Engaging vendors was required.

Technical set up

Ensuring comfort for our participants was imperative, and it’s not just through the way the script is written and delivered. Make sure non-speaking participants are obscured from the interviewee’s perspective, else it may make them anxious knowing that there are many others in the same call. In Zoom, you can do this by clicking on VIEW mode and selecting the side-by-side speaker option. Another thing to take note of is protecting yourself. Enter the call with only your initials(e.g PL). This helps prevent doxxing.

Ensure you have this option selected

End result: side by side of speakers. User will not be able to see others who dialed in. Make sure you are on mute too!!

Note and collect actual quotes

It’s tempting to form your own conclusions and assumptions throughout the interviews, but it’s critical to document quotes for each participant. Because this will be set aside for part 3: synthesis. In my opinion, document to a level that it is almost close to transcribing. The reason for this is, different members of the team may uncover interesting themes from certain verbatim, so don’t start interpreting for your participants at this point in time. You can discuss your opinions in your debrief or before you start synthesizing.

Don’t jump right in and dash through all interviews, stress test via pilot interviews

Make sure you have a pilot and hours in between to adjust as you try your interview sessions out. What worked for our team was to run the pilot interviews 1 week before with 2–3 participants. From there we would observe and adjust the interview script, suggest to our moderator on the common behvaiours captured and revise the language used in some parts.

Other important stuff to have a workaround should it happen:

• Technical difficulties. It was our first time experiencing network issues due to weather! So factor in extra time or have back up interviewees.
• Travel time for vendors. Consider distance + previous interview exceeding allocated time + worse case traffic conditions
• Anticipate difficult emotions during interview. Some questions that may sound harmless, but may invoke emotions to different people. For example: we had an interviewee who got upset when we asked about how she felt on a particular day, she teared up and then shared about her strained family relationship.
• REST. Zoom fatigue is very real!! Additionally, we can get difficult participants, those that require additional nudges to get them to share more. Even as a note taker it sapped energy from us, so imagine the moderator!

Get creative: add in activities to break the monotony of just listening and replying.

Listening to another person ask questions for X amount of time can get tiresome, thus we incorporated simple activities that helped to build rapport and enable engagement.

An easy activity asking about family members who are staying with them and who isn’t.

“Travel” to another country through a screen

The environment which interviewees live in will help researcher and build more context and empathy. To solve this issue, we had a quick, 5 minutes activity where we requested our interviewees to show us around their house and the household appliances they deemed the most important.

Have a chat group for discrete communication with moderator during the interview

We found it particularly useful to have a separate chat group for observers, note takers and moderator. As interviewees may have interesting answers that we are keen to find out more, the chat serves as a place to supplement more questions without being too disruptive to the session. A good moderator can then inject them whenever the opportunity arises during the chat.

A quick debrief helps

Limit your debrief session to 15 mins max after the interview for all observers, note takers and moderator to gather and share interesting data. This helps to retain information and possibly add on to notes. Having it short also allows everyone to rest their eyes and brains too.

This concludes part 2 of my reflection on exploratory design! Head on to part 3, where digital canvases are your best friends for collaboration across multiple networks, seas and states.