How to Document Research Interviews

After doing a customer interview you need to synthesise your insights right away before your memory fades. And because time is always tight, we'll share a quick and simple format so you can get back to other work.

Author

Rory Madden
December 16, 2024

When it comes to continuous interviewing, Teresa Torres is the leading expert. Teresa has written about her interview snapshot which she advocates for documenting user interviews. I think it is fantastic but I think there is an important addition that we can make to help both with running your interviews as well as documenting them.

Teresa Torres’ Interview Snapshot

“An interview snapshot is a one-page template that helps you quickly capture what you learned from a single interview… making the interview more memorable, actionable and reference-able”

Teresa Torres

Teresa’s snapshot consists of five key areas. She goes into these in a lot more detail in her article so please read that if you’d like to know more.

  1. The interviewer name, photo and quick facts

  2. A memorable quote - this can help trigger memories of the interview

  3. An experience map that reflects the story that you collected in the interview

  4. A list of opportunities that you heard

  5. A list of insights from the interview

An example of an interview snapshot

The Challenge with the Current Snapshot: Insights

If I asked you to make some art it can be hard to know where to start. The phrasing is so vague that it presents you with many options; a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, digital art. And we know from psychology that too many options can lead to decision paralysis, increased anxiety and dissatisfaction.

How does this relate to the interview snapshot? The first three elements: interviewer details, memorable quote and experience map are straightforward. Opportunities are more vague, but Teresa gives some direction on guidance on these. Opportunities are the unmet needs, pain points, and desires that emerged from the story. These categories make it easier to identify and document the opportunities in the interview.

But the fifth element, Insights, is left ambiguous. What is an insight? How is an insight different from an opportunity? What is important enough to write down and what is not important enough? Unfortunately the only guidance that Teresa gives for insights is that they are not opportunities.

“Oftentimes when engaging with a customer, we’ll learn about something interesting that is not explicitly a need, a pain point, or a desire. Instead, it’s an insight. It’s something that we want to capture, but we aren’t sure what to do with it yet.”

Teresa Torres

Giving More Clarity to Insights

I think we can make it easier for people to identify and document insights from their customer interviews. Two key things we need to learn when running customer interviews are the trade offs that people are making when choosing a solution and the emotions involved in the decision. In the article, 5 different research interview question types, we explain how to ask questions to uncover the emotions that influence decisions and the trade offs that people make. These questions can give us some structure to document our insights against.

Emotions can be tracked using the four forces of the job-to-be-done framework:

  1. Push forces: what the person does not like about the current approach

  2. Pull forces: what is attracting the person to a new solution

  3. Habit forces: the familiarity with how the person solves the problem today

  4. Anxiety forces: the fears and uncertainties associated with adopting a new product or service

Adding a fifth category for documenting the tradeoffs that the person is making in their decision journey would round out our insights.

The Updated Interview Snapshot

Dividing our insights into different categories makes it a lot easier to capture the key insights from each interview. In addition, having more structure to your insights makes it easier to derive insights across multiple interviews.

An updated interveiw snapshot with 5 categories for Insights: Push forces, Pull Forces, Habit forces, Anxiety forces and Trade Offs.

When I am writing up interviews I’ll often find that I forgot to ask a question diving into one or more of the forces (I need to focus on anxiety questions more!). If this is the case with you, don’t worry about leaving a section blank. Leaving it blank is much better than making assumptions about what the person might be feeling. Bad assumptions could end up influencing product decisions so we need to make sure that the insights we are writing down were actually uncovered in the interview.

Conclusion

One happy side-effect of being more structured in trying to uncover the forces at play is that it can often improve the quality of your experience map. Examining the journey from different angles provides more clarity and context to the steps they are taking.

I’d love to hear from you on whether you think this is an improvement to Teresa’s already fantastic snapshot template. And if you have any feedback on trying to implement it I’d love to hear from you.