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1

Who are you researching?

Pick one user ‘group’ per worksheet - you’ll probably have different questions for different users.

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You’ll want to map who is affected by the problem - this includes your service user group. But also your stakeholders - staff and possible external agencies who interact with the end user and the problem.

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You’ll also want to think about whether your users are a homogenous group or whether you can or need to break them down further into sub-groups with possibly different experiences. Think about gender, age, ethnicity, socio-economic background. Make sure to record this for each person you interview so you can review this later as well.

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2

What do you want to find out?

Creating research questions.

Before diving into the interview questions, have a think about the broad things you want to know. These are your research questions.

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Examples

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• What are their needs and behaviours?
• What devices they use and what for?
• What problems they face?
• How they currently solve their problems?
• What a normal day in their life looks like?
• What services/products they use to do X?

3

Interview questions

Now it’s time to think about the questions you need to ask to find out about each of the areas you’ve identified in the section above.

• Don’t ask leading questions

Instead of ‘how useful did you find the training’, ask ‘how did you find the training’.

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• You need detail

Try rewriting any questions that could be answered with ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’.

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• Avoid asking about future behaviour

Humans are really bad at predicting their behaviour. Ask your users questions about their past or current experience and avoid hypothetical questions like ‘would you use x…’

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Giving timeframes will make it much easier for the interviewee to answer, like ‘in the last 6 months how often have you used x.

• Avoid jargon

Use language that your users will understand

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• Tech habits

Knowing what technology your beneficiaries are using is crucial to building any new product or service, and it can also help debunk some of those long-held internal assumptions about your users.

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• Before the interview, work out what’s the one thing you want to find out from this research

Sometimes an interview doesn’t go to plan - don’t worry, just skip the other questions and try and find this one thing out.

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• Intro and thank you

Add an introduction to your script, explaining why you’re doing the research and thanking them for their time.

4

Introduction

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, we really appreciate it.

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We’re doing some research into [...]

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We’re not testing your knowledge - we’re just interested in your experiences and opinions so please be as honest as possible.

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If you’d rather not answer a particular question, or want to take a pause at any stage, that’s fine, just let me know and we’ll move on. You can end the conversation anytime you want.

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This interview should take about [...] minutes.

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Please take a few minutes to read and sign our consent form.

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Have you got any questions for me before we get started?

Interview script

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• You can use this to get started on your user interview
• Write directly into the copy on the right hand side or copy it into a new document.

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5

Write your interview questions here...

Example questions

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• What devices do you use?
• What do you use them for?
• What websites / services / apps do you use on a regular basis?
• Would you mind running through a typical day from start to end? What do you do first?
• In the last 6 months, how often have you used X service/product?
• How do you find out information about X?

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6

Consent form

You should ask all your participants to sign a consent form.

Here is a template you can use - just make a copy and tweak to suit your charity. We recommend you run this by the person in charge of safeguarding before you use it.