Stakeholder interviews: the foundation for setting design goals

Like user interviews, stakeholder interviews can give you information about the project and make sure you don't end up doing irrelevant work or wasting time on research that has already been done. In this article we will look at who the stakeholders in a project are and why you need to involve them, how to go about it, and how to use this important information in the design process to get the best possible outcome.

Who are stakeholders?

Stakeholders are the parties with a stake in a project: an individual, a group of people, or an organization that influences how the project runs and whether it succeeds. So when you start a user research project, take the time to work out who the most important stakeholders for your design project are and, if you can, win their cooperation to help make your design process a reality.

Anyone whose work will be affected by your research is a stakeholder, regardless of seniority or job title. They might be people like customer support specialists, who carry a heavy burden when the design or the product experience is poor, or they might be silent partners who end up doing the heavy lifting at the tail end of a project.

The more relationships you have inside an organization, the easier it is to identify your stakeholders. Lean on your team manager or on people who know the organization well to help you find the right people to involve.

Potential stakeholders for UX research include people who:

• Have influence over the organization
• Make decisions about time, money and resources
• Take part in designing the product and the user experience
• Hold information relevant to your project
• Will act on the insights from your research

When should you interview stakeholders?

The stakeholder interview is an important tool in the early phase of product development, when you are trying to define your goals and plan your research.

And not only in the early phase. For projects that are complex or run over a long period, you should sit down and talk with stakeholders at least once in every phase of the product. This keeps your research on track, gets the whole team generating new ideas together, and gathers any additional information the project may need.

What are the benefits of interviewing stakeholders?

1. Defining goals

Stakeholders contribute to the success of your project. But what exactly do the project's stakeholders want? What do they need? What does success look like to them?

Project briefs and design requirements often contain ambiguity that can lead to misunderstandings. It is not unusual for stakeholders to have requirements they never state or write into the initial documents, either because they consider them obvious or because they are not aware of them. Like user interviews, stakeholder interviews help bring all of those unspoken goals to the surface, spell them out in detail, and clarify the nuances that can get forgotten or muddled along the way.

2. Understanding constraints and needs

What is the product vision? What are the needs at this stage? What do the existing metrics look like? What would get in the way of selling or marketing the product? What has worked well in the past? What hasn't?

Talking with stakeholders gives you a baseline of the resources that already exist and helps you determine whether the research you had planned is actually necessary. There is a good chance they have already done some data gathering of their own, and they may even point you to a database that saves you time and resources. On the other hand, stakeholder interviews can also reveal the limits of what they know. What don't they know about users' needs? Are some of the assumptions they are making things users really need?

Part of a researcher's job is to identify the user goals that stakeholders are not focused on, or don't even recognize.

3. Earning trust

If you do your job well and are someone who genuinely cares about every part of the organization involved in the project, and you bring professionalism to your approach, you can usually win their engagement. Solving problems later on becomes easier when trust and communication are there from the start.

Even when stakeholders are involved in the user experience research process, they may still be skeptical of you (if you are new). That is simply because it ties directly to the resources, time and extra cost in their plans.

Stakeholder interviews are your chance to establish or maintain relationships with the key players, show interest in their goals, bring each side's thinking into the open, and help everyone feel that they have had a say in the project.

Are there any downsides to stakeholder interviews?

Stakeholder interviews come with their own challenges. As downsides go, they are minor compared with the value you gain. Still, the following points are worth weighing when you plan stakeholder interviews.

1. They take time

The whole process takes time, possibly a lot of it. You can usually manage this simply by arranging your schedule so that you only need to run X interviews within Y amount of time. You can also trim part of the interview process to finish on time, or combine interviews where it makes sense.

2. Some stakeholders don't want to take part

Some stakeholders are happy to advise you. Others are not especially interested. You will have to gauge how interested they are in being interviewed, so that you don't ask for more information than they are willing to give. Making sure your interviews are well organized and professionally run will help inspire confidence in you.

3. They create expectations

When people take part in the research process, they tend to develop certain expectations. They want to see results and get answers to their questions. Some stakeholders may even want to dig into the data or watch videos from the research sessions. Have a plan for communicating results throughout the research, and make sure the documents and reports live somewhere stakeholders can find them.

What will you ask stakeholders?

As with any research, the first thing you need to do is work out your goal: what do you hope to understand from the stakeholders? You should know what you cannot change, so that you can focus your research effort elsewhere.

Here are some important topics to cover when you talk with stakeholders:

1. What is this project?

The more you know about the project or product, and about what the organization hopes to achieve with it, the better you can make sure the research is relevant.

Project overview:

• Can you briefly walk me through the history of the project?
• What is the reason for building this product or doing this project?
• What are the project's goals?
• What do we need to clarify?
• Who are our biggest competitors?

Business goals:

• What are the short-term and long-term business goals?
• What value does this project bring to the business?
• What are the biggest product challenges right now?

2. The role and interests of stakeholders in the project

If you understand stakeholders' backgrounds and motivations, it becomes easier to tell where you will meet resistance or find support for the research process and for design changes. Common questions are:

• What is your role in this project?
• What have you done on this project so far?
• Personally, what do you consider success for this project?
• Do you have any concerns about this project?
• How would you like to be involved in the user research? (For example: reading reports, joining interviews, results workshops.)
• Is there anyone else we need to talk to?

3. What has already been decided about the project?

If you know the project's constraints, it is easier to decide how ambitious to be with your research and with design changes. Questions might include:

• What has been decided about the project / product so far?
• Which requirements have already been set for the product?
• Which technology decisions have been made, and how firm are they?
• When will the product be released?
• How big is the development team?

4. Who are the users?

By clarifying what people already know about users and learning who the target customers are, you can make sure you research exactly the right users. You might ask:

• Who are the customers / users?
• Which user problem are we solving?
• How would we describe the product's core value to our customers?
• What user research relevant to this project has the team already done?
• What is the product's main context of use?

A few tips for interviewing stakeholders

1. Make a plan

Define what you want to achieve in the interviews. Which questions do you need answered, and how do they rank in priority for the next step of your project? Every question you ask should relate to at least one of these goals. That way, the stakeholders' responses will be useful for your work.

An interview can take you and the interviewee anywhere. You should plan ahead and have a list of topics and questions to steer the interview back toward the original route.

2. Keep it relaxed and friendly

This is not the kind of interview you run in a cold, mechanical way. These are people you will be working with a great deal in the future. Yes, they are often busy, but they are also often experts in their field, and once you break down the barriers the conversations can become fascinating. You never know what interesting information they will bring you. That said, you should also be ready for some of your project questions to go unanswered.

3. Listen to the person you are interviewing

In large organizations, some stakeholders don't get their opinions and views on challenges and risks heard as much as they would like. Listen more. You will discover all sorts of interesting things about how the way the business operates will affect your project, and you will make someone else feel validated as part of it.

4. Don't assume that everything they tell you is true

We are all human, we all have to deal with politics (inside the organization), and everyone is busy. Some of what your stakeholders tell you will be incomplete, and some of their preconceptions about customers and users rest on old research, assumptions or stereotypes. What they have to say is still interesting, just not necessarily the final version of the truth.

5. Be really flexible

Take the initiative and go to wherever they are. Especially if they are senior. Interviews at a coffee shop in the morning, in the office pantry, anywhere you can get 30-60 minutes with someone, will change your perception of the project's big picture.

6. Let them go

Nothing is worse than a distracted interviewee. If there is something they need to deal with, let them go and arrange another session. They will not give you their full attention while their phone is ringing.

7. Tell them what's in it for them

Stakeholders are usually busy and are not sure why they should spend time on you. Don't forget to explain a little of the benefit when you open the conversation, and more of it as you wrap up your request. Show that you are using their time wisely and in their interest.

In short, being proactive pays off. One way or another, there is always a network of different stakeholders that the product being designed should serve. Stakeholder interviews are a great way to get a grip on the situation. They help you understand user behavior, make out the constraints, and identify the pain points.