Being able to talk with user is one of the basic requirements for even starting to do design. I know that in some fields it might be a tricky thing to do, especially if there is any sensitive information involved either from the user or the company. In my case, this was quite straight-forward as there were hundreds of thousands of customers I could talk with and many of them had given us the permission to send emails to them.

Starting with the surveys

It makes sense to start with setting up the process of doing surveys as that way it is possible to ask the survey respondents to volunteer for interviews. This way there are already some people who you know to be open about joining an interview.

I was lucky to start with a large email subscriber list and a handy email automation platform. Naturally this part is more difficult without an existing way to get in touch with customers. That said, unless the company is a very early-stage startup there are ways to get in touch with existing customers.

I created the first few surveys simply using Google Forms for the survey itself and using the email platform to send a bunch of our email subscribers an invite to respond to it. To motivate people to take part in the survey, I promised the chance to win a 35€ giftcard for those who responded. To get the volunteers I needed for my interviews, I added a question related to that in the end of the survey and that worked well for getting volunteers. I believe I got over 400 volunteers from the first survey…

GDPR compliance

Since then, the process has changed a little. Using Google Forms presents some GDPR issues as the data is stored in the US and it’s not possible to change that without a company account. And even with a company account I wasn’t sure if I could get GDPR things set up correctly, so I moved to SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey also stores their data in the US but with them it’s possible to set up a legal contract which grants the same level of data protection as in EU, and that makes it ok from GDPR perspective. These GDPR things can get complicated but by taking some time it’s possible.

Another GDPR related addition I have since made is always including a link to a privacy statement in the survey description. GDPR requires that people are always given the information what personal data you are collecting, how their data is used, and what are their rights regarding the data, so it’s important to include a privacy statement. There are standard templates for this which are easy to customize to fit the needs.

Analysing the results

For analye the surveys I have been using multiple different tools depending on the need. For the most complex customer research project I bought a license to a market research software called Q. It has been really handy for most kinds of analysis I need to do. I have also used R to do quantitative analysis, sometimes Excel for quick things, SPSS for cleaning data, and Miro to organise open responses and to organise the insights. SurveyMonkey also has basic tools for summarising the responses in case no actual analysis is needed or I just need to share a screenshot of the results.

Organising the first interviews

After doing the survey and collecting volunteers for interviews, it isn’t that hard to get those going too. I personally don’t like the recruiting part of doing interviews because it usually takes me a long time to write the invitation emails and figure out what I want to tell the customers. I have gotten a lot faster over the months though!

The same GDPR things apply for interviewing people, so I make sure to include a privacy statement written for interviews and ask the customer to email me a written confirmation that they have read and accept the privacy statement. The privacy statement notes for example that I am recording the interview with their permission and how I will make sure the interview data is anonymised etc.

Volunteer base + email templates + Calendly = 5/5

I have an Excel file stored on my computer with the contact details of the people who volunteered to take part in interviews. In that file I have some background information for the customers who wanted to provide that to me. I have columns for age, gender, and how many orders they have made from us, which allow me to filter different people for different purposes. If I want to understand how to make the first-time experience better, I can recruit customers who have ordered only once or if I want to get some elder customers for usability testing, that is also possible.

Since the beginning, I have also been marking down which of the volunteers I have contacted, who have responded to my emails, and who have participated in interviews. This way I can avoid spamming the same customers over and over again. I also get statistics of how many emails I have sent vs. how many of those people have participated in the interviews. This helps estimate how many emails I need to send if I want to recruit for example three customers to interviews. At the moment that figure is around 5 emails to get one participant.

I use email templates to make my life easier when sending out those emails. I have pre-written emails which have the right title-line and the whole story about what I am inviting them for, so I can just copy-paste the correct email address to send that email to. I could of course send all the emails at the same time but then I couldn’t add the customer’s name to the emails, so I usually do this by creating and sending separate emails. The idea of accidentally sending out the email to multiple customers with each others’ email-addressed being visible also makes me anxious 😄

Calendly is a game-changer for scheduling interviews! It’s a service which allows you to give the customer a link through which they can easily check all the possible times when the interview could happen and book a slot that works for them. Before I started using Calendly, I would have to write out the possible times with exceptions for the customer and then they would compare those to their own calendar and that was just a tidious process when trying to schedule e.g. 10 interviews for the same week. I use the free version of Calendly and it works just fine for my needs.

No-shows are inevitable when doing interviews, and to minimize them I always ask the customer if they want me to send them an SMS message a bit before the interview. I believe that could be automated using Calendly but I haven’t gone that far yet.

Outsourcing the recruiting?

At some point I thought that it would make my life so much easier if I outsourced the recruiting for interviews that I asked for an offer from a Finnish company doing interview recruiting. Their cost would have been 900€+vat for six interviews which made me decide that it’s not too bad to do it by myself.

Inspired by this I also wanted to see how easily I could recruit people from outside of our own customer base. I set up a social media advertising with our marketing team, used maybe 5-10€ for showing it on social media, and collected 50 volunteers who hadn’t used Fiksuruoka before. Naturally it tooks some time to then schedule interviews with some of them but that’s also a feasible process for interviewing people who have never heard of your company.

What I would do differently now?

With those processes in place, I have completed around 30 interviews and received thousands of responses to surveys.

That said, the recruiting process is still one of my least favourite things I do as a designer. I don’t exactly know what would need to change for it to become more “fun” but I just dislike writing and sending out those emails.

Doing surveys isn’t so bad now that I am used to the idea that I am sending out an email to thousands of people and if there are issues with the links or the survey, hundreds of people will notice those.