How to interview a UX person without breaching an NDA Part 2
So now you have an understanding of the candidates process, now some basic questions.
1. How did you get involved in usability?
1. Notes: User Experience is the implementation part of usability, UX focuses the project on the target audience expected experiences, it tests the business requirements against this audience to see if there is a divergence or other interpretation of ‘How things work’, it then aligns business and customer through a set of experiences, in the experience framework and delivers these as specifications, wire frames, models or videos.
2. When you’re setting up a project what are the key stages?
2. Notes: See How to interview a UX person without breaching an NDA, I left out two key stages from this post on purpose from the Requirement stage. Never ask a candidate about these things, they should know them already and freely mention them. If they do there are more questions.
- Designing the Research (or pilot study), there should always be an initial study to validate the thinking before defining the direction and objectives of user research. This is to deal with the assumptions that often affects research in terms of the affinity of purpose in project driving similar outcomes when they should be very different.
- Defining the Participants, this is the participant screening document which is essential to define who should take part and to understand what their motives and drivers will be behind any perspective they bring.
3. If your project relates to the whole of the UK how many participants should be involved to make it statistically viable? And if you can’t get all you need how do you manage the risk it creates?
3. For a UK opinion the statistically viable number of participants is around 1300 according to the opinion poll companies like MORI. As that number of participants is rare to be involved (the most I have had was 800 and that was several years ago) managing the risk is a key factor in UX. I can hear the call of 10 users or even 5 users being enough, that is simply not true, has never been true, but if your client company wants to risk an entire $100,000,000 on 5 people’s perspective go for it 🙂 This is all about RISK MANAGEMENT not creative flair or expenditure.
To manage the risk of too few users UX tends to tightly focus on one key or target audience as an amalgam shown in a persona model, with secondary persona groups, with primary and secondary drivers. Theses drivers also feed into the ‘Happy path’ and ‘Unhappy path’ experience which are mapped for task flows (not the same as BA ones as they relate to a cognitive walk through and require both positive and negative outcomes to test the concept). If the candidate does not create personas then they do not manage the risk and they are not involved in UX.
There are another 50 or so questions that could be asked all of them have very detailed technical answers.
If you would like to be trained to interview people for UX roles please contact me.