Category: interviewing

Interviewing – part 2

Five weeks ago, I detailed my process for writing questions in preparation for a face-to-face interview with a technical communicator. The interview occurred last Friday and my report is now done. However, because of the 2,000-word limit, I have not been able to share what I have learnt about interviewing or any limitations in that particular experience. This is what I will try to do with this blog post.

The interviewee

My interviewee, A., was a perfect interviewee. Every question I asked got a thorough answer. I would say she talked for two to four minutes to answer each question. That is a lot of information. And she did not just repeat herself either, though she did repeat some information in order to back up her answers.

I found this redundancy very helpful while I was summarising the transcript before writing the report. What I usually do when I have to summarise content is that I first summarise and rephrase each section, or question, to highlight the themes that will structure the summary. Having call-backs to content in other sections or questions makes it easier to organise all those rephrased bits thematically. So this is definitely a characteristic of a good interviewee in my book. With a less prolific interviewee, I think my strategy would be to introduce that redundancy myself by asking him/her about links between topics, concepts.

If I identify one risk with a prolific interviewee, it is the possibility of straying off topic. The interviewee goes off on a tangent about something that is irrelevant to your purpose or they dive deep into details that are not in the scope of your assignment. Thankfully, that did not happen here. Not only is A. a professional technical communicator who interacts with SMEs daily, but she is also an alumnus of my university programme who did the same assignment a few years ago. She knew about the topics and constraints.

The subject of this interview experience is a limitation of this assignment in a way. As professional technical communicators, our interviewees may be too perfect. They know the drill because they are struggling every day (or not, I hope) to get the right amount of adequate, clear information. And if they can get that information in a way that facilitates structuring, even better. As A. mentioned, her first interactions with SMEs were difficult. SME interview struggles seem like a rite of passage where every communicator must find the strategies and questions that work best in each case.

The questions

When I prepared my forty questions, I wondered how I would have time to go through all of them. As I said above, A. answered several questions at a time. I think her background played a role there, but I also started the interview by stating all the topics I wanted to cover during the interview, which might have helped her to expand her answers while staying focused. Again, I would need a less cooperating interviewee to test that practice.

A.’s rich answers had a few consequences on the interviewing process. First, I chose to record the interview so that I could focus on her answers and limit note-taking. Not realising how long her first answer was going to be, I made a mental note to ask her about one detail she mentioned and another detail she did not provide regarding her role. Then, another detail. And another one. Of course, I forgot about a couple of those details by the end of her answer. Thankfully, the follow-up questions I forgot were details that only required a one-line email answer, but that was a rookie mistake. I am no longer the fast note-taker of my interpreting days and I got caught up in my interviewee’s speech. Note to self: go back to practising note-taking.

That error and the length of A.’s answers forced me to re-evaluate my strategy. A. answered several questions at the same time with extra info, but she never strayed from the scope, so I decided to prioritise questions that were likely to elicit the same type of answers and to phrase follow-up questions as mirror questions, summarising what A. had just said whenever she took a break and asking about any detail that caught my attention in her answer or any information she had not yet given me. For example, A. mentioned that most of her team members work from a different location or from home and that she sometimes works from home, so I followed up later on with “So, you and your team work from different locations…” A. being the “perfect interviewee”, she answered with the right information before I could even finish my question.

This sounds like an obvious strategy, but I was extremely self-aware at the time that I was listening to A. while trying to determine from her answer what would be the best follow-up question to elicit the maximum amount of relevant info and rephrasing that question in a conversational style. The fact that A. and I have very similar academic and professional backgrounds helped as we immediately established a good rapport. As a result, A. adopted a conversational style where I was able to bounce off phrases like “as you know”, “you know how it is”.

Though it is very unlikely that such a situation will occur often in future interviews, I expect it will be worthwhile looking for similar opportunities to break the ice, like looking for common interests. If that is not an option, I guess that the most basic ice-breaker would be to show that I have researched the topic and that, at least, I understand the basics.

Conclusion

Interviewing a professional technical communicator may not be a perfect simulation for an SME interview, because the professional communicator has internalised good interviewing practices. However, the combination of preparing detailed questions and a prolific interviewee forced me to adapt my questions, my attitude and my interviewing style during the interview. It also helped to consider how I could adapt my strategies for different types of interviewees.

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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