Contextual interview

Step-by-step guide

1. ‍Define specific research question As always, you need a leading question or a set of questions representing what you want to find out. Also, consider why you are doing research (exploratory vs. confirmatory research), what you want to do with your findings (personas, journey maps, system maps, etc.), and what sample size you’ll probably need.
2. Identify interviewees Based on your research question, define criteria for selecting suitable interviewees, considering not only who you interview, but also when and where. Use sampling techniques to select your interviewees and consider including internal experts or external agencies for interviewee recruitment.
3. Plan and prepare Plan how to approach your interviewee. What expectations do you set beforehand, how do you start, how do you end, and how much time do you plan for the interview? Write up interview guidelines based on what you want to find out and what experience you are trying to achieve for your interviewee. Such guidelines should be semi-structured, so that they help you not to forget anything during the interview, but give you the flexibility to change your agenda if useful. Also, consider who you want to include as interviewers from the client side or from other departments involved in the project. Agree on how you’ll document the interviews and set up legal agreements if necessary to take voice recordings, photos, or videos.
4. Conduct interviews During the interview, ask open and non-leading questions. Consider using specific interview techniques, such as the Five Whys, to reveal underlying motivations. Use the situational context and ask interviewees to demonstrate specific activities or artifacts they are talking about; saying “show me” in a contextual interview is very useful, as people often say something different from what they actually do. Agree in advance on the roles within your interviewer team; establish beforehand who will ask questions, and who will observe and take notes. During your interview, try to collect as much unbiased “first-level construct” raw data as possible. The length and depth of contextual interviews varies with the research objective: from several quick, 5-minute interviews at, say, a ticket machine in a train station to interviews of 2–3 hours at home or at a workplace.
5. Follow-up Write up your individual key learnings right after the interview and compare them within your team. Keep track of all your documentation (e.g., by indexing your field notes, transcripts, photos, audio and video recordings, and collected artifacts) and highlight important passages. For each interview, write a short summary that includes your key findings as well as raw data to exemplify these, such as quotes, photos, or videos. Don’t forget to link the summary to your interview data (that’s where indexing comes in very handy).