Interviewing stakeholders

Now that you have the stakeholders mapped, you should organize interviewing them. Keep in mind that stakeholders can reveal assumptions and knowledge gaps, technical requirements or restrictions, and tacit business/content requirements that can be essential for the project. A document by Oracle about stakeholders interviews focused on UX suggests that we should keep in mind that stakeholders are not substitutes for primary user research, but we should not rule out the importance of talking with them. These interviews will help us to frame our questions for users.

Besides previously knowing each of the stakeholders who will be interviewed, you should prepare a script to guide you. At the very least, have a list of topics to discuss and at the most, have a specific list of questions. It is important to keep in mind that you must be prepared, but it should still feel like a conversation. Consider sending questions or topics in advance. It is important to make the stakeholder more comfortable about the process and allow them to prepare a little. You can use the interview checklist suggested by Kim Goodwin, the author of designing for the Digital Age. The UXApprentice website also has prepared suggestions for questions to ask in the stakeholder interview, which you can find here: uxapprentice.com/resources/stakeholder-interview-template/.

Try to plan at least 45 minutes for each interview. A good suggestion from Ten Guidelines for Stakeholder Interviews, by the UXmatters website, is to leave at least 30 minutes between interviews and also limit an interview to just three or four major topics. It is crucial to listen carefully and not ask leading questions and be watchful about assumptions and bias. The interviews should help you to raise what would be the Must Have, Nice to Have, and Not Sure (or Out of scope) for the project. However, take care to not talk about solutions, features, implementation details, or other details such as colors and typefaces. You will want to understand the company culture, see what they know and think about the users's needs, identify problems, and set goals. Don't ask for solutions or take their ideas as final solutions, don't forget that you are designing for the real users, not for the stakeholders. Clarify answers you don't understand and be attentive to inconsistent information between different stakeholders. It might be a good idea to organize workshops to bring them together in order to have everyone on the same page.

You can also take advantage of all these meetings with the stakeholders to explain to them what UX is and what the purpose of the project is. This will make not only what you are trying to accomplish and solve clear to them, but also it will make them feel part of the process and also responsible for the solution. You might find suspicious or sceptical stakeholders. The more you educate them about the UX work, the more they will work in partnership with you and help the whole process be much smoother. It is also crucial to get them involved during the process as much as you can.

By the end of all these interviews, you might have a list of a few main issues that the company has been facing that might be affected by a bad user experience, such as high bounce rate, low conversion, low registration, lack of engagement, low number of subscriptions, high cart abandonment rate, and so on. Frequently, the issues raised by the stakeholders can be only symptoms that you will understand more deeply when you start doing user research. Make sure to organize and document all these takeaways.