Week 3: Beginning of Interviews
Google, email, plan, interview, synthesize, repeat.
With half of the New York team out of town for a project this week, it was weird coming in to the oddly quiet studio on Monday morning. However, the silence didn’t last long as it was soon filled with the Hamilton soundtrack blasting from the speakers.
Our focus for this week was on interviews. This process involved searching the web for relevant people to talk to, reaching out to them over email, waiting for them to respond, scheduling interviews with those who would respond, actually interviewing them, then finally synthesizing the interviews. We spent Monday emailing everyone we could think of — from friends to family members to professionals to professors to doctors.
On Tuesday we actually began our interviews with a couple of interviews over Google Hangouts and in the studio. We spoke to several young adults who we viewed as potential users and learned more about how they handle mental health. These user interviews continued throughout the week and we were able to ask them about how they think about mental health and what they do to deal with stress and anxiety. At least two of us interns were present at each interview, with one asking questions and talking while the other took notes. After each interview, whoever was taking notes would write down some of the important quotes from the interview on sticky notes as seen below.
After conducting six interviews this week (five with target users and one with a clinical psychologist), we were ready to start synthesizing some of our findings. We organized our interview quotes into groups with similar themes so that we could more easily notice patterns. One interesting pattern we found was that a lot of our users would do similar exercises when they were stressed out or anxious. For example, many of our interview subjects said that they sing or talk to themselves when they feel anxious. Learning about these hacks has definitely given us a lot to think about as we continue to narrow down what we want to build.
Next week we will finish up our first round of interviews with some more users and professionals. We look forward to speaking with them on Monday and Tuesday before moving on to creating hypotheses and thinking about paper prototypes. We’re excited to see what the next phase holds!
