User Research

Staff Interviews

We interview between ten to thirty staff members, as determined by you and your research budget.

Each interview lasts twenty to thirty minutes and covers questions about the person's role, their perspectives on their work and their work environment.

Focus on problems - not solutions

We don't ask about desired features and functionality, but rather explore the work lives and needs of staff.

How the intranet might meet these needs is not relevant at this stage. We dont want to jump to solutions before we've properly identfied what issues we're trying to solve!

Sample staff interview questions

Contextual interviews

The initial interviews help us decide which staff might be appropriate for a contextual interview.

Contextual interviews take place within the actual environment a staff member works within, rather than in a formal interview space.

We might look at things such as workstation setups, how staff access important information (digital or otherwise), notes and lists around reception, isolation or connectedness of a person's workplace etc.

Sample contextual interview questions

Sample recruitment email

Surveys and tester recruitment

Objectives for the survey:

quantify staff requirements
recruit testers, content owners and intranet champions

See a sample survey:

User survey form

Card sort & site architecture

A card sort requires participants (approx 50) to group and categorise information. This exercise helps us structure the site and label the pages and sections so that they make sense to the majority of users.

Sample IA with content detail