"Video Lecture _ Lecture 16 How to Run a User Interview”
In this post, I'm going to present the major and essential ideas of the
16th lecture 'How to Run a User Interview' by Emmett Shear. Before beginning
couple words about the lecturer: Emmett
Shear (born 1983) is an Internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the
co-founder of live video platforms 'Justin.tv' and 'TwitchTV'. He's also a
part-time partner at venture capital firm Y Combinator. Emmett Shear is also
co-founder of 'Kiko Software', the first AJAX-based online calendar. Shear
graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a degree in computer science.
The
lecturer's first startup was the 'Kiko Calendar' which he has run with his
friend Justin Kan. Eventually; they sold that app to 'eBay'. After this, he
founded his second startup called 'Justin.tv'. The concept of the startup was a
reality show of Justin Khans' life. At first, the website/platform was designed
for the founders, who were the real and original users of the product. While
they were working on the improvement and expansion of the idea it occurred that
other people not only founders were interested in their idea. Therefore, they have
constructed a specific website. In that website, everyone could run a live 24/7
reality-show which represents their personal life. While having such an
interesting and good product, founders have several issues and were unable to
widen the range of the startup. The main problem was lack of information for
the user cases. Next, the founders came up with the idea to have mobile and
gaming enterprises. They were able to take a risk and broadcast video games. It
wasn't easy to charge the idea. Hence, to implement the project they started to
interview people in order to assemble valuable and helpful information.
Therefore, this step assisted to continue, for the next three years they used
the valuable data and estimated all pros and cons for making all the characteristics
of their product 'TwitchTV'. Furthermore, Emmett Shear take serious
concentration into the method of interviewing users. The broadcasters were the
notable and viral individuals for the founders as through their examination
they observed several factors and reasons why people go or watch the specific
stream on a website. It is important to choose the right people throughout the
interviews. The main reason is that you should select the most suitable and
useful questions to ask for. Consequently, it is also essential to take into a
consideration your target users, however; there does not exist any specific
method which will help through the process of finding. During the interviews
with the users, as they think they know what they certainly need; it is useful
to ask questions about the characteristics of your product. So, if you do not
perceive a real problem after the process of interviewing the primary users,
that does not determine and guarantee that other users will be satisfied and
not face the issues. Moreover, Emmett Shear told that you get the horseless
carriage effect where you are asked for a faster horse instead of asked to
design the actual solution to the problem. This means that you should do what
you were doing continue to interview and talk with various people which have
distinct areas of the region. In this way, it will be more beneficial to obtain
a collection of interesting and different concepts. Later, conducting
interviews based on the data received you should be able to think and study
what type of features it is more beneficial to make. After this step, you
should verify the product. While presenting your product to users it is
important to mark their first impressions. This will make clear if those people
are willing to spend money on your product. Thus, if people pay for your
product this means they are interested in it and its features. Hence,
co-founders spoke with different broadcasters about their experience before
launching 'TwitchTV'. What do the founders receive after these questions and
discussions? They all had several common issues regarding the platform.
Moreover, the lecturer and his colleagues also had a chance to communicate with
a well-educated segment of users who were using other services, aside of
'TwitchTV'. Therefore, these users had a huge contribution as they gave a
valuable data as they were familiar with the structure of the product and
understood it well. Aside from this, another essential point to recollect is that
interaction with non-broadcasters can also be very useful. In fact, the most
important ones are non-broadcasters as the size of your market depends on the
view and assumption of your non-users. Unless you communicate with individuals
who are using your contestants’ products you cannot achieve and obtain the
necessary data for expansion of your market. Eventually, during interviews,
they have found out that many users did not have particular skills for using
their product. Therefore, they began to study about the solution for this
dilemma. So they increased the range of their activities and even build
broadcasting into the 'Xbox'. Later, they concentrated on different tasks
amongst which was the stability and quality of their service as well as the
universal access for users all over the world. Nonetheless, sometimes the
interviews and talks with users may not be as pleasant as founders might not
meet the expected answer. The most unfavorable one is the circumstance when you
introduce your desired and ideal feature to the users and they did not find
anything interesting in that. Thus, often users are more enthusiastic about
other things and they do not care about what you believed was meaningful at
all.
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