How To Prepare for Planet 4 User Interviews
Over the past few months, we created a handful of archetypes to guide design decisions for Planet 4. These were designed based on research, assumptions and informed guessing. We pulled together a proposal (the archetypes) to test our approach and ideas, but we need to validate them with actual data. To accomplish this, throughout the month of January we will interview people in the environmental community and people who may not even be aware of Greenpeace’s existence. The purpose is to learn what motivates someone to get involved with activism and answer questions which will drive P4 user journeys, such as: “What triggers someone to switch from being a consumer to an information sharer?”
We have been working with volunteers to prepare for conducting and documenting these interviews. Here’s how we are doing it:
Step 1: Preparation and materials
It all starts with a screener to recruit interviewees. The screener will be used to identify if the people we recruit more or less match the profile of the archetypes and if they might perform well in an interview situation.
Next, there’s a guide to structure the conversations and provide insights around change agent motivations and triggers. To help us do this, we outlined our goals that derived from the archetype creations:
In these interviews, we want to find out
- What are participants’ motivating values, attitudes, beliefs?
- What are participants’ goals (related to change they’d like to see in the world)?
- What is their relationship to acting for change in the world?
- What keeps them from acting?
- What needs, challenges, and frustrations do they have?
- What resources do they need to feel confident identifying and acting as a change agent?
- If they use Greenpeace sites (or if we have an artifact/concept to show them):
- Does it match their needs?
- What works well?
- What is frustrating, incomplete, gets in the way?
Finally, a note taking form to make it easy for teams of distributed interviewers to collect and share synopses or impressions in a consistent format.
Step 2: Testing the materials
We decided to test out the materials to determine if they were in fact usable. This had the additional value of giving us examples to provide interviewers for their preparation.
Nadav and I tested the interviews on Google Hangouts, and after our conversation, he filled out the note taking form. This helped us to refine the form a bit so that it was streamlined to reduce duplication and increase consistency. Stay tuned, a post on this interview is on the way, for you to take it as example.
Step 3: Practice interviewing and note taking
With these resources in hand, we held a peer to peer practice session for all of the interviewers to wet their feet testing out the script. We documented notes for the session so that anyone who was unable to attend could asynchronously prepare. The session was challenging but an informative learning experience for all of those in attendance. Here are some quotes:
Participants used the rest of the session to brainstorm tips and best practices for the upcoming interviews.
Hopefully this preparation has left those responsible for facilitating interviews feeling empowered and mobilized and will help future interviewers prepare for their sessions. The first round of interviews is scheduled to conclude mid-January. All of the personal data from interviews will be kept private. The team, however, will take notes and synthesize the findings in a public post. As we mentioned, our goal is to validate (or invalidate) assumptions around the archetypes. This means we will find out that we were right or wrong about what our audience needs from Planet 4. In either cases, archetypes will evolve over course of the project, and your inputs will be crucial to shape the different Planet 4 user journeys.
If you are interested in volunteering to be interviewed for the project, please fill out this form, if you are willing to be an interviewer, send the Planet 4 group a note with your location, language and time availability!
