You Won’t Always Get What You Want

With story-based interviewing, you won’t always collect the story that you want. That’s okay. The golden rule of interviewing is to let the participant talk about what they care about most. You can steer the conversation in two ways.

First, you decide which type of story to collect. You can ask a more open question like: “Tell me about the last time you watched streaming entertainment.” Or you can ask for a more specific story: “Tell me about the last time you watched streaming entertainment on a mobile device.”

Second, you can use your story prompts to dig deeper into different parts of the story. If you are primarily concerned with how they chose what to watch, dig into that part of the story. If you aren’t particularly interested in what device they watch on, don’t ask for that detail if they leave it out of their story. Let your research questions guide your story prompts.

However, even so, you might encounter some participants who simply don’t cooperate. They might not have a relevant story. They might be motivated to tell you about a different part of the story. They might not want to tell you a story at all. They might give one-sentence answers. Or they might want to share their feature ideas or gripe about how your product works.

In these instances, you’ll want to do the best you can to capture the value the participant is willing to share, but don’t force it. You always want to respect what the participant cares about most. Remember, with continuous interviewing, you’ll be interviewing another customer soon enough. When we rarely interview, a disappointing interview can feel painful. When we interview continuously, a disappointing interview is easily forgotten.