Interview strategies
In our last post, we discussed our plan of combining different styles of interviews given the unconventional nature of our design process. In this post, let’s take a closer look at how we designed our interviews to generate insights for our discovery research.
Goals of discovery interview
As discussed in previous posts, the priority of our current research phase is to identify verticals with needs that best align with Zensors technology. In our market research, we identified a list of potential verticals to adapt Zensors technology, and generated a landscape view of each vertical. However, these views are often too broad in scope for us to understand how sensing technology can be applied. Thus in our discovery interviews, we are targeting working professionals in these verticals to validate or supplement our findings from market research.
Specifically for each interview, we plan to generate a snapshot of the participant’s role and daily workflow. To identify areas that have a need for Zensors, we want to probe current technology use at the participant’s organization, the metrics they utilize, and their sentiment towards current technology/data tools.
Protocol & other considerations
Each discovery interview is typically 30 minutes. The advantage of the 30 minute format is that it is easier to recruit participants and allow the team to conduct interviews. However, there is only so much we can learn from a short, 30 minute chat with a stranger. The time constraint requires us to be very strategic in our use of time. In designing our interview protocol, the team generated a wealth of questions regarding sensing technology use in industry. After a pruning session, we reached a protocol consisting of 11 carefully chosen questions directly targeted to the goals we want to achieve.
In order to better identify needs, we were cautious not to prime our participants into thinking about cameras. We deliberately excluded any mentions of Zenzors technology in our recruiting and interview documents. At the current stage, we are more interested in accurately identifying needs for sensing technologies. Nonetheless, we are well aware of the possible concerns around imagery, privacy, and AI technologies. Deep dives into these concerns will be in the following phases of our research.
Interview #0
In true computer science fashion, let’s take a look at Interview #0. Our participant is an executive at a supply chain solutions company. As supply chain is one of our prioritized verticals, this interview was especially helpful for us in identifying which sections within the supply chain domain to pursue further. Currently, sensing technology is applied in supply chain domain in the form of RFID tags, which is used to record locational and environmental data through the transportation of goods. The value offered by RFID technology represents an interesting opportunity for Zensors that we want to explore more in the future.
Regarding interfaces, we learned that some supply chain solutions have established dashboards or data visualization tools. This finding indicates alternative sensor data output methods may offer more value for our customers, and integration with other dashboard or data-visualization tools provides another option for the presentation of sensor data. However, this scheme of data processing could be industry-specific, or even company-specific. It isn’t clear how universal this use case is, but definitely worth exploring!
One-size-fits-all protocol doesn’t work
During our Interview #0, we identified flaws in our interview protocol as well. Our interviewee was an executive within the company, thus questions regarding specific workflow details weren’t effective in generating insights. On the other hand, managerial interviewees have more insights on performance evaluation and long-term decision making, and we would be missing out if we don’t probe in these directions.
We designed our questions to be industry agnostic in order to generate universal insights, and this was verified to be effective in our interview. But to make our short interview time more effective, we need to take into consideration the position of the participant. After the interview, we expanded our interview protocol into two versions, managerial and on-site staff. In the managerial version, we emphasize more on the decision-making and performance-tracking aspects, while the on-site staff version focuses more on daily work routines.
