Sprint

Conduct interviews with your chosen customers to test the prototype

Instructions

Set up two designated rooms. Ensure you have two separate rooms to facilitate the sprint process effectively. The main sprint room will serve as the central space where the team can watch a video feed of the interviews. Additionally, you'll need a smaller, dedicated room for conducting the actual interviews. Make sure this interview room is clean and comfortable to create a pleasant experience for your guests.
Choose five people to interview. Assign the responsibility to the designated Interviewer on your team to choose five target customers for the interviews, which will take place on Friday. Conducting five customer interviews in a single day allows for significant patterns and insights to emerge.
Watch the interviews collectively as a team. Watching the interviews as a team is more efficient and enhances the ability to draw accurate conclusions. Everyone should gather around in the main sprint room, where the interview will be streamed.
Prepare a grid on the whiteboard prior to the interviews. Before the interviews begin, create a grid on the whiteboard that will serve as a visual representation of the data. Each customer will have a dedicated column, and each prototype or prototype section will be represented by a row on the grid.
Conduct the five-act interview process. If you are the designated interviewer, ensure you make the customer feel welcome and at ease. Begin with casual small talk before transitioning into specific questions related to the topic you are trying to gain insight about. Introduce the prototype to the customer, reminding them that certain aspects might not work as intended and emphasizing that you are not testing them personally. Ask the customer to think aloud while interacting with the prototype, and provide gentle nudges or follow-up questions to encourage them to express their thoughts. Toward the end, ask questions that prompt the customer to summarize their experience. Express gratitude to the customer, offer a gift card as a token of appreciation, and show them out.
Take comprehensive notes during each interview. Provide sticky notes and markers to the team members and encourage them to jot down direct quotes, observations, interpretations, and indications of positive or negative aspects.
Post the notes after each interview. After each interview, place the corresponding sticky notes in the appropriate row and column on the whiteboard grid. Take a brief moment to discuss the interview as a team, but avoid drawing definitive conclusions at this stage.
Identify patterns and themes. At the end of the day, silently review the whiteboard and look for common patterns and themes that emerge from the accumulated data. Encourage the team to categorize these findings as positive, negative, or neutral and make a note of potential implications and insights.
Summarize insights and plan the next steps. Revisit your long-term goals and the specific questions you set out to answer during the sprint. Compare these objectives with the patterns and insights identified during the interviews. Determine the appropriate actions to take following the sprint based on the analysis. It is essential to document these decisions for future reference and clarity.