On Interviewing

Here is a sample of our assignments in semester 2 with my first thoughts upon learning about them:

• Design and develop an online learning resource – I should be fine as long as I can find an interesting topic.
• Blog – This is not a surprise, but it is still anxiety-inducing.
• Share and discuss industry insights on Twitter – See “Blog”.
• Create an e-portfolio – 1. Great idea! 2. Oh! But then, there will be recruitment interviews. See “Blog”.

Amongst these personal challenges, interviewing an industry professional seemed like the easy part. This wasn’t my first time asking questions. Firstly, questions are part of the translator’s role. Also, I just handed in my summer development project proposal, which included a thorough interview with a subject-matter expert. So, why the struggle with this assignment?

Open and closed questions

Interview questions can be classified into several types: open, closed, primary, secondary, and mirroring. In her article “Open-Ended vs. Closed-Ended Questions in User Research” (Nielsen Norman Group), Susan Farrell defines open and closed questions:

“Open-ended questions are questions that allow someone to give a free-form answer.
Closed-ended questions can be answered with “Yes” or “No,” or they have a limited set of possible answers (such as: A, B, C, or All of the Above).”

Closed questions may yield more accurate answers; however, they might yield only the answers you expect. On the other hand, open questions give more freedom to the interviewee to stray from your expectations. Consider this example from the same article:

[Closed] “Do you think you would use this?”
[Open] “How would this fit into your work?”

In order to learn as much as possible when interviewing industry professionals, we should favour open questions, in particular as primary questions to introduce new topics. We should try to limit closed structures to secondary questioning, i.e. to get complementary information.

Old habits die hard

As a project manager, I asked open questions, for example to clients: “What are you looking to achieve with this project?” But mostly, I asked closed questions to get accurate information. As a translator, agencies recommend that I ask closed questions and that I favour multiple-choice questions to expedite the answering process for clients. Of course, this is not foolproof: receiving a “Yes” to an A, B or C multiple-choice question is incredibly common, slightly frustrating, but always funny. On the other side of that spectrum, occasionally, a client will go above and beyond and provide incredibly detailed context. I am forever thankful for these caring professionals.

When I interviewed the SME for my proposal, I used a mix of both closed and open questions, though a few of the closed questions implicitly required the SME to expand on his answers. Thankfully, this SME was a strong advocate in his field and he was willing to share as much as necessary.

I have never had an unwilling interviewee. This is a challenge: learning to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Over the last few days, I have reviewed my interviewee’s profile and made notes about potential questions as I went about other business. Then I sat down to tidy everything. You guessed it: most questions were closed-ended. I managed to improve my questions by referring to the sample ones that Madelyn Flammia provides in “The challenge of getting technical experts to talk” (1993), but I was not satisfied yet.

A double focus

Earlier this week, I shared on Twitter an Informaze article entitled “The power of deep interviews” by Iryna Sushko. Coming back to it later this week, the first two tips finally unblocked something in my brain:

“Tip #1 – Start with why?”
“Tip #1a – Why do you need this question?”

I need to get as much information from my interviewee. But why do I need that information? For this specific interview, my goal is to answer my personal questions and doubts. I have a double focus: the interviewee and myself.

To a greater extent, the issue is the same with each interview. Why am I doing this interview and spending time on it? Why do I need to create this content? These seem like obvious, fundamental questions. But it is so easy to get lost in the what (What questions do I ask? What content do I need?) and the how (How do I phrase this question? How do I structure my content?).  Keeping the “why?” in mind may also prove useful to motivate an unwilling interviewee, by showing him or her why his/her input matters.

Work faster

Each time I go back to my questions, I manage to improve them a little by asking myself why I want to know something. Now, I just need to learn to speed up that process, because I doubt that I will often have two weeks to prepare interviews.

References

Farrell, S. (2016) ‘Open-Ended vs. Closed-Ended Questions in User Research’, Nielsen Norman Group, 22 May, available: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/open-ended-questions/  [last access 17 February 2019].

Flammia, M. (1993) “The challenge of getting technical experts to talk: why interviewing skills are crucial to the technical communication curriculum”, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 36(3), 124-129, available: https://doi.org/10.1109/47.238052.

Sushko, I. (2018) ‘The power of deep interviews’, Informaze, 12 September, available: https://informaze.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/the-power-of-deep-interviews/ [last access 17 February 2019].

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