The project has been agreed. You have a customer participant and an interview slot. The next job is to discover what happened, rather than persuade the participant to repeat the supplier’s preferred headline.
Prepare a short interview brief around the experience you need to understand. It should help the interviewer follow a real example and recognise a missing piece of evidence. This is a different meeting from the client discovery call, where you decide what work to scope and whether customer access is possible.
Give the interview one central question
Write the question a reader should be able to answer after the story. “How did the team move from a spreadsheet to a shared scheduling process?” gives the discussion a direction. “Why is the software great?” supplies a verdict before you have heard the account.
List what you know, what someone has claimed and what remains unknown. Keep those categories separate. If a supplier says its customer saved time, record that as a claim to investigate, not a fact for the introduction.
The GOV.UK guide to in-depth interviews recommends preparing topics and follow-up questions while using open, neutral questions about real experiences. That principle is useful here: plan the ground you need to cover without scripting the customer’s answers.
A completed brief for the interviewer
Fictional exercise: a software supplier has commissioned a written story about a facilities team changing its maintenance scheduling. No interview or customer result described here is real.
| Brief field | Completed example |
|---|---|
| Reader | An operations manager evaluating a similar scheduling change |
| Central question | How did the team introduce a shared schedule without losing urgent requests? |
| Participant | The coordinator who handled the weekly schedule during the change |
| Known within this exercise | The team used spreadsheets before the rollout; the coordinator took part |
| Claim to investigate | The supplier says scheduling became easier; no quantified saving is established |
| Example to request | One urgent maintenance request before the change and one afterwards |
| Supporting material to ask about | A publishable process diagram or anonymised scheduling example, if available |
| Boundary | No individual employee performance details or confidential site information |
| Intended output | A written explanation of the process, with only supported, approved statements |
The brief gives the interviewer a route into the experience. It does not require the customer to provide a positive result or a number.
Plan prompts that let the account develop
Open with the participant’s responsibilities during the period discussed. Then invite a concrete event: “Can you talk me through an urgent request that arrived while the old process was in use?” Follow the sequence, the decisions and the people involved.
Useful follow-ups include “What happened next?”, “How did you know who was handling it?” and “Was that typical, or was this case unusual?” If the participant describes the new process, ask which steps changed and which stayed the same. A story becomes more useful when the reader can see the boundary of the change.
Avoid a chain of questions that all demand benefits. Make room for what was difficult, what required additional work and what the participant would do differently. Those answers can clarify the implementation without turning the interview into a complaint exercise.
Investigate numbers without manufacturing precision
If a participant says “it took half the time,” ask what task, period and comparison they mean. Was the estimate measured, reconstructed or an impression? Who could confirm the calculation? Is there material that can be shared and reviewed?
In the fictional scheduling exercise, the participant cannot substantiate a time reduction but can describe how requests were assigned. The writer records the assignment process and leaves the time-saving claim out. A specific account of the work is preferable to a precise-looking number without a defensible basis.
Do not spend the interview bargaining for a stronger quotation. Preserve the participant’s meaning in your notes and separate their exact words from your paraphrase. Later, the evidence register connects candidate statements with the relevant passage and any necessary follow-up.
Make the recording and follow-up arrangements clear
Explain how the session will be recorded or noted, who will receive the material and what publication review is planned. Confirm those arrangements with the participant before proceeding. If the session is not recorded, mark that limitation and arrange a way to verify quotations or detailed facts rather than reconstructing exact speech from memory.
Share high-level topics beforehand so the participant can prepare relevant examples. Wistia’s testimonial guidance also discusses preparing participants without handing them a script of answers. Keep the preparation useful: the participant should know what the conversation concerns, not feel expected to perform a prewritten endorsement.
Finish with an evidence handoff
Before closing, confirm the outstanding factual questions, the material the participant has offered to check and the agreed next contact. Do not convert a friendly conversation into permission for uses that were never discussed.
Your handoff should contain the interview reference, candidate passages, unresolved claims and the next reviewer. Move the project into its approval map with those items intact. The brief succeeds when it helps you produce a story the participant recognises and the reader can understand, even when the strongest publishable account differs from the original hypothesis.