The UB Project Report: Week Five
End of week five, Buffalo. Last week, we completed a fairly intense daylong workshop with Indi Young and Eric Fain, devoted mostly to the principles of non-leading interviews and the process of combing through transcripts for the tasks that will eventually be the building blocks for our mental models.
I’ve come to two conclusions:
First, the best interviewers for this process are the ones who have:
a) gone through several years of therapy and/or have a parent in the counseling profession
b) done a good deal of teaching in some sort of setting
c) led an awful lot of intake meetings over time
As Jeremiah put it, it’s a hard thing to pull back from “tell me what you want and need, oh my wonderful client” to allowing the conversation to go where it needs to go. Indi likens it in her book to the kind of conversation you’d likely have with someone at a cocktail party. (Funny, but those are the hardest to remember through the martini haze.)
The second conclusion is that parsing human behavior is a hard, hard, hard thing to do. One of the things that I really love about Indi’s mental models framework is that it provides a fairly granular and scientific methodology for understanding your users’ expectations and needs. It’s time- and labor-intensive (and it also requires a great deal of discipline in consistently dissecting from interview to interview), but it’s thorough and the resulting IA is imminently defensible.
Our project team spent most of this week laying the technical groundwork for scheduling, recording, and processing phone interviews—Google Apps, Skype and plugins, Garageband, and Quicktime, oh my. Next up, 66 one-hour calls over three weeks. We’ve got four interviewers and four audio-transcript combers prepping for the breakneck effort. Let the wild rumpus start!
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