Interviewing an Archetype

In our post Who are we designing for?, we detailed 3 archetypes to focus on for the first iteration of Planet 4. Our next step is to talk with people who we think fit these archetypes. We want to find out how well the archetypes match reality, so we can adjust them. At the same time, we want to better understand the motivations, goals, and challenges people face with respect to taking action to make a difference in the world. This will help us develop concepts and ideas that serve the actual needs of the real people who make up the audience of Greenpeace websites.

To do so, we’ve begun planning a series of qualitative interviews. The interviews will be conducted in the coming weeks by a group of volunteers from around the world, many of whom will be doing this for the first time, so we want to be sure to give them support and resources to help them succeed (and, hopefully, enjoy the process). Take a look at Jessica’s How To Prepare for Planet 4 User Interviews for more on how we’re approaching this part of the project.

Since it’s always best practice to test out a research tool, we conducted a pilot interview. And to demonstrate to new researchers what an interview looks like and how to document the findings, we videotaped the conversation and wrote up our notes. The notes are not meant as a transcript, but rather they’re a way for us to capture the high level findings revealed through the interview.

What did we learn?

Looking over these notes, we can see that Jess clearly shows some of the characteristics we’d expect from the Frontline Defender archetype. For example, while she didn’t think of herself as an activist prior to this interview, she had in fact done a prodigious amount in response to a specific, local situation in which she felt compelled to act by a threat to her family and community. And although she’s very active on social media, she appears to use it more to communicate with a small set of people who are directly connected to an issue, whether politicians or neighbours, rather than sharing more generally with a wide audience (as we’d expect from a Connected Evangelist).

Overall, we’re quite happy with how the pilot interview went. The guide seemed to flow reasonably well and we got the type of information we are hoping to elicit. I can’t wait to see how the other interviews go and how our findings impact the archetypes and our understanding of the motivations, barriers, and opportunities for our audience.

We’ll continue to interview people across and outside of the Greenpeace community as we begin developing user journeys for Planet 4.

Would you like to be interviewed? Let us know!

You can watch the whole interview here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2QLK5LM2Q6XJ4PgmJeHK1smJ-KM7WTY8